Computational Cardiology: a novel non-invasive personalized approach to assess Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD)

The next webinar of the VPHi Keynote Webinar Series will take place on 20 June 2018 at 18 CET featuring Prof Natalia Trayanova from the Johns Hopkins University. The webinar will be broadcasted live during the 3rd VPH Summer School in Barcelona. 

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) from arrhythmias is a leading cause of mortality. For patients at high SCD risk, prophylactic insertion of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) reduces mortality. Current approaches to identify patients at risk for arrhythmia are, however, of low sensitivity and specificity, which results in a low rate of appropriate ICD therapy. There is a critical clinical need to develop risk metrics that directly assess the interplay between abnormal myocardial structure and electrical instability in the heart, that together predispose to SCD. During the webinar Natalia will present a novel non-invasive personalized approach to assess SCD risk in post-infarction patients based on cardiac imaging and computational modeling. In computational cardiology, personalized 3D computer models of post-infarction hearts are constructed from patients’ clinical magnetic resonance imaging data. Each heart model incorporates not only myocardial structure, but electrophysiological functions from the sub-cellular to the organ, allowing for representation of electrical instability. Thus the interplay between abnormal myocardial structure and electrical instability in the heart that predisposes to SCD can be directly assessed. In each heart model, it is conducted a virtual multi-site delivery of electrical stimuli from ventricular locations at different distances to remodeled tissue so that the patient’s heart propensity to develop infarct-related ventricular arrhythmias can be comprehensively evaluated. 

The webinar is free and open to anyone but registration is mandatory. If you plan to attend please register as soon as possible. Spaces are limited!

Registration link

The VPHi keynote webinar series is a quarterly event organized by the VPHi Student Committee that provides a forum for access to senior community members and their expert competence for chiefly young scientists, but also to the VPH community as a whole. 

With the series, VPHi wishes to:

• Offer added value to prospective young scientist VPHi Student members through core content
• Create visibility of VPH knowledge dissemination for external stakeholders
• Highlight excellence within the VPHi, additionally providing student members with a label of quality
• Promote scientific interaction between junior and senior community members and across VPHi disciplines

Prof Natalia Trayanova

Dr. Natalia Trayanova is the Murray B. Sachs Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Computational Medicine, and directs the Computational Cardiology Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Professor in the Department of Medicine. In 2013, she received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for her project “Virtual Electrophysiology Laboratory”. Dr. Trayanova was also the inaugural William R. Brody Faculty Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. She is a Fellow of the Heart Rhythm Society, American Heart Association, Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.