WASHINGTON 鈥� Virtual reality may soon revolutionize cardiac care and change the way doctors fix a broken heart.
A team of bioengineers at Johns Hopkins University has devised a way to create a custom computer-driven model of a patient’s heart: It鈥檚 , and it uses images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
“The potential is enormous,” says ,聽a professor of biomedical engineering who heads the Computational Cardiology Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
Trayanova says the聽virtual heart could become an important diagnostic tool for cardiologists. It enables them to pinpoint a problem and聽determine how聽to fix it by zooming in聽from the whole heart, down聽to the molecular level.聽Trayanova calls it a “Google heart,鈥� referencing the zoom in-and-out feature of Google Maps.
Trayanova’s lab is bringing together multiple disciplines 鈥� from聽basic聽math, to computer programming, to molecular science 鈥� all in a quest to improve diagnoses, save critical time and make the whole process far less invasive for patients.
For now, her team is focusing on those who experience arrhythmia 鈥� a聽fast or聽irregular heartbeat 鈥斅燾oming from the lower chambers of the heart. This is what is known as an “electric” heart condition.
With聽the virtual heart, doctors are able to track the trouble spot, as well as the flow of electric activity throughout the heart muscle.
Instead of an exploratory point-by-point probe of the heart聽with a catheter that could go on for hours, doctors can look at the virtual heart and then聽go directly to the problem area to deliver treatment,聽which is often an ablation to destroy a small piece of problematic tissue.
Trayanova says the virtual heart is a much more accurate way to “map” a heart, and ablations performed this way produce much smaller lesions because the聽鈥渟earch and destroy mission鈥澛爄s far more targeted.
She says her team is clearing the last hurdles to clinical trials. 鈥淲e are extremely excited about that fundamental leap from basic science to the bedside and the patient.”
Next up: Bringing virtual heart technology to arrhythmias emanating from the upper chambers of the heart. Trayanova predicts that over time, the technology will continue to evolve, creating a paradigm shift in cardiac care.
