HEALTHCARE SIMULATION
But that’s not the shape of my heart
What if physicians and surgeons could virtually analyse their patients’ health and plan therapies and surgery using the same advanced simulation technology that the automotive, aerospace, energy and hi-tech industries rely on to test their products before they are built? What if medical devices could be designed and safely tested in the virtual world before ever being tested in the real world? Andy Pye reports on the Living Heart Model, which is a major step towards this being possible
faster and develop novel approaches that aremore effective and safer for patients. All of which leads to better designs and a reduction in expensive prototyping and testing, allowing companies to get products and services tomarket faster. Cardiac arrhythmia can be an undesirable and potentially
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lethal side effect of drugs. During this condition, the electrical activity of the heart turns chaotic, decimating its pumping function, thus diminishing the circulation of blood through the body. Some kinds of cardiac arrhythmia, if not treated with a defibrillator, will cause death withinminutes. Before a new drug reaches themarket, pharmaceutical
companies need to check for the risk of inducing arrhythmias. Currently, this process takes years and involves costly animal and human studies. Decades of important research have already created a wealth of
information on various aspects of heart function. Only recently have spectroscopic techniques advanced sufficiently to reveal the critical subtleties in geometric structure and physiological
10 /// Environmental Engineering /// December 2017
omputer simulation is increasingly being viewed as an essential design tool by companies throughout industry, including those specialising in cardiac devices and services. Simulation helps visualise what specialists cannot see, replicate in vivo conditions, refine ideas
phenomena that are essential to developing amore complete understanding of the dynamics of the heart. Further complexities in heart function – particularly in congenitally defective and diseased hearts and their interaction with interventionalmedical devices and replacement structures – require additional research. Three-dimensionalmodelling of the heart, based on real world, patient-specific input, can unite all of this data and support promising research in advanced surgical and therapeutic directions. In the LivingHeart Project, the LivingMatter Laboratory of
Stanford University has developed a software tool enabling drug developers to quickly assess the viability of a new compound. This means better and safer drugs reaching themarket to improve patients’ lives. This research project is supported by SIMULIA,Hewlett
Packard Enterprise, Advania, and UberCloud. It is based on the development of a LivingHeartModel (LHM) that encompasses advanced electro-physiologicalmodelling. The end goal is to create a biventricular finite elementmodel to be used to study drug-induced arrhythmias of a human heart. Regulatory compliance is a key component of device
development. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), through initiatives such as the creation of a simulationmodel
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