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Amsterdam, the Netherlands - Royal Philips Electronics today
announced that it will lead a new European Union
(EU) funded research project called ‘euHeart’, which
is aimed at improving the diagnosis, therapy
planning and treatment of cardiovascular disease –
one of the biggest causes of mortality in the
western world.
By targeting the diagnosis and treatment phases of
the care cycles for heart conditions such as heart
failure, coronary artery disease, heart rhythm
disorders, and congenital heart defects, the euHeart
project complements the recently announced
HeartCycle project, also led by Philips, which
focuses on the long term management of chronic heart
disease patients.
The euHeart consortium aims to develop advanced
computer models of the human heart that can be
personalized to patient-specific conditions using
clinical data from various sources, such as CT
(Computed Tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance
Imaging) scans, measurements of blood flow and blood
pressure in the coronary arteries (which feed the
heart muscles) and ECGs (Electrocardiograms).
These computer models will integrate the behavior of
the heart and the aorta at molecular, cellular,
tissue and organ-level. They will also incorporate
clinical knowledge about how cardiovascular disease
disturbs the correct functioning of the heart at
these levels. As a result, it may be possible to
develop simulation tools that doctors can use to
predict the outcome of different types of therapy,
and because the models will be personalized to
individual patients, the therapy could be equally
personalized.
“euHeart is a very exciting project that will bring
together the latest advances in modeling and
computing to improve the care of patients with heart
disease,” says Professor Reza Razavi, the Project’s
Clinical Coordinator who is also Professor of
Paediatric Cardiovascular Science and Head of the
Division of Imaging Sciences at King’s College
London (London, United Kingdom). “It may ultimately
allow us to select and optimize the best treatment
for individual patients.”
As an example, one way of treating heart rhythm
disorders is a minimally invasive procedure known as
radio-frequency ablation. During this procedure, a
catheter is inserted into the patient’s heart and
the tissue responsible for propagating abnormal
electrical signals through the heart muscle is
destroyed using heat from a radio-frequency field
generated at the tip of the catheter. At the moment,
doctors have to rely on their experience to decide
which areas of tissue to destroy – a task that is
complicated by the fact that the electrical activity
in every patient’s heart is subtly different. With
the aid of a computerized model that reflects the
patient’s unique heart structure and function,
doctors may be able to test the results of
destroying different areas of tissue before they
have to operate on the patient.
"The development of computer models that integrate
structural and functional information of the heart
and then personalize it to individual patients is a
mammoth task that will require the
multi-disciplinary effort of researchers with strong
know-how in biophysical modeling and image
processing, clinical experts, and engineers in the
device and imaging industries," commented Henk van
Houten, senior vice president of Philips Research
and head of the Healthcare Research program. "In the
euHeart project we are confident that we have
brought together the necessary expertise and that we
can make a real contribution to improving the
treatment of one of the world’s killer diseases".
The euHeart consortium comprises public and private
partners from 16 research, academic, industrial and
medical organizations from six different European
countries. It will run for four years and has a
budget of approximately EUR 19 million, of which
approximately EUR 14 million will be provided by the
European Union as part of the EU 7th Framework
Program. The project forms part of the Virtual
Physiological Human (VPH) initiative – a
collaborative effort that aims to produce a computer
model of the entire human body so that it can be
investigated as a single complex system.
Within the multidisciplinary euHeart consortium, the
University of Oxford (Oxford, UK) is the scientific
coordinator of the project, while King's College
London (London, UK) leads the clinical program.
euHeart Consortium membership (in
alphabetical order)
Academic Medical Center Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Berlin Heart (Germany)
Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (Germany)
HemoLab (Netherlands)
Hospital Clínico San Carlos de Madrid Insalud
(Spain)
Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche
Médicale (France)
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en
Automatique (France)
King’s College London (United Kingdom)
Philips Healthcare (Netherlands, Spain)
Philips Research (Germany)
PolyDimensions (Germany)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
University of Karlsruhe (Germany)
University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
University of Sheffield (United Kingdom)
Volcano Europe SA/NV (Belgium).
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