Electromechanical Models of the Heart as Predictive Clinical Tools

We propose to continue to build a strong bridge between the highly 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 Univers ity of California, San Francisco (UCSF). With this collaboration, we intend to continue to combine our expertise to create advanced patient specific cardiac models to answer important scientific questions and to test clinical hypotheses. There are tw o main scientific aims to the project. The first is to leverage the work done in 2013 through a previous travel grant where we created a detailed electromechanical simulation of an infarct injured ventricle. We plan to continue to use this developed mod eling pipeline, but also to extend its clinical relevance to not only predict how the heart behaves during a single beat, but to how the organ itself changes over time as a result of injury. The second project will be to use Simula's simulation tools an d UCSF clinical data sets to create clinically relevant cardiac models to test a novel treatment method for heart failure. We plan to use developed simulations to investigate its mode of action and optimize the treatment. In addition to working toward s common scientific goals, this research stay is intended to benefit both the participants through exchange of information. The face-to-face time enabled by the grant will give UCSF training with our computational tools and allow input into its developme nt cycle, which will provide them with a powerful tool for their continued research. Meanwhile Simula will gain recognition for the dissemination of its software outside of Norway. Also, this research stay will give Simula the ability to shape clinical e xperiments along their own needs, bringing back specialty data sets that will be both useful in tuning existing mathematical models as well as developing the next generation of tools for clinical simulation.