Section: Research Program

Computational Cardiology & Image-Based Cardiac Interventions

Computational Cardiology has been an active research topic within the Computational Anatomy and Computational Physiology axes of the previous Asclepios project, leading to the development of personalized computational models of the heart designed to help characterizing the cardiac function and predict the effect of some device therapies like cardiac resynchronisation or tissue ablation. This axis of research has now gained a lot of maturity and a critical mass of involved scientists to justify an individualized research axis of the new project Epione, while maintaining many constructive interactions with the 4 other research axes of the project. This will develop all the cardiovascular aspects of the e-patient for cardiac e-medicine.

The new challenges we want to address in computational cardiology are related to the introduction of new levels of modeling and to new clinical and biological applications. They also integrate the presence of new sources of measurements and the potential access to very large multimodal databases of images and measurements at various spatial and temporal scales.

Our goal will be to combine two complementary computational approaches: machine learning and biophysical modelling. This research axis will leverage on the added value of such a combination. Also we will refine our biophysical modeling by the introduction of a pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) component able to describe the effect of a drug on the cardiac function. This will come in complement to the current geometric, electrical, mechanical and hemodynamic components of our biophysical model of the heart. We will also carefully model the uncertainty in our modeling, and try to provide algorithms fast enough to allow future clinical translation.

• Physics of Ultrasound Images for Probe Design: we will design a digital phantom of the human torso in order to help the design of echocardiographic probes. This will be done in collaboration with GE Healthcare whose excellence centre for cardiac ultrasound probes is located in Sophia Antipolis.

• Cardiac Pharmacodynamics for Drug Personalisation: we will add to our biophysical cardiac model a pharmacodynamics model, coupled with a pharmacokinetics model and a personalisation framework in order to help the adjustment of drug therapy to a given patient. This will be done in collaboration with ExactCure, a start up company specialised on this topic.

• New Imaging Modality Coupling MRI and Electrodes: we will use our fast models in order to regularize the ill-posed inverse problem of cardiac electrocardiography in order to estimate cardiac electrical activity from body surface potentials. This will be done within the ERC Starting Grant ECSTATIC coordinated by Hubert Cochet from the IHU Liryc, Bordeaux.

• Cardiac Imaging during Exercise: a particular aspect of the cardiac function is its constant adaptation to satisfy the needs of the human body. This dynamic aspect provides important information on the cardiac function but is challenging to measure. We will set up exercise protocols with Nice University Hospital and STAPS in order to model and quantify such an adaptation of the cardiac function.

• Sudden Cardiac Death is the cause of important mortality (300 000 per year in Europe, same in US) and it is difficult to identify people at risk. Based on a large multi-centric database of images, we will learn the image features correlated with a high risk of arrhythmia, with the IHU Liryc.

• Personalising models from connected objects: with the Internet of Things and the pletora of sensors available today, the cardiac function can be monitored almost continuously. Such new data open up possibilities for novel methods and tools for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.