Clinically driven Electromechanical Models of the Heart

This project is designed to help bridge the gap between the theoretical work being done at the Cardiac Modeling Group at Simula Research Laboratory with the clinical and experimental expertise at the Cardiac Biomechanics Laboratory from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). With this collaboration, we intend to combine our relative strengths to create advanced patient specific models of cardiac electromechanics in a clinically driven fashion. There are two main scientific aims to the pr oject. The first is to create a detailed electromechanical simulation of a patient suffering from arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia (ARVD) and to use this to test clinical aspects of vulnerability to arrhythmias. The second will be to use Simul a?s simulation tools and UCSF clinical data sets to create cardiac models of patients suffering from myocardial infarctions. These will be used in the travel period as well as after the research stay to study stress and cardiac remodeling. The resulting models will provide new insight into the mechanisms of heart failure and sudden cardiac death after an infarction. In addition to common scientific goals, this research stay is intended to directly benefit both the participants. The face-to-face time enabled by the grant will give UCSF training with our computational tools and input into its development cycle, intended to provide them with a powerful tool for their continued research, while Simula will gain recognition for the dissemination of its so ftware outside of Norway. Also, this research stay will give Simula the ability to shape clinical experiments along their own needs, bringing back specialty data sets that will be both useful in tuning existing mathematical models as well as developing t he next generation of tools for clinical simulation.