Ultrasound guided cardiac arrhythmia treatment

Every 30 second, a person in the Western world suffers sudden cardiac death and/or death from heart failure. These two conditions remain the major challenges in modern cardiology. However, new treatments now emerging offer hope in combating these events. Despite significant advances in new therapeutic approaches, current tools for risk stratification are insufficient, and treatment using ablation therapy or implantable pacemakers is often not optimized yielding less thansatisfactory results. In order t o bridge the gap between clinical needs and currently available technology for the assessment of cardiac dysfunction and its underlying etiology there is a need to develop competence in Europe within this area. Better tools for measuring and deriving card iac deformation patterns, mechanical activation, electro-mechanical delay and accurate imaging guidance during electro-physiological ablation procedures have the potential to greatly improve the outcome for patients being treated for cardiac arrhythmias. The current key limiting factors to achieve this are: - Immature and unreliable tools for tracking cardiac mechanical deformation - Lack of tools for assessing electro-mechanical relationships in the heart - Lack of researchers capable of operatin g across the integrated fields of ultrasound acquisition, image processing, visualization, cardiac electrophysiology, cardiology and interventional cardiology. Through training and knowledge development in a focused research project, USART will provide Europe with experienced researchers with the cross-disciplinary understanding and research skills necessary to develop enabling technologies in an industrial setting. The longer term outcome of the project is new products which will benefit patients acros s Europe directly by advancing the state of care related to these key issues within cardiology.