Virtual-heart approach could guide treatment for fast heart rhythm

Ventricular tachycardia is a life-threatening fast heart rhythm that occurs frequently in heart attack patients and can lead to sudden cardiac death. Catheter-based radio-frequency ablation, which delivers energy to destroy the ability of cardiac tissue to conduct electrical signals, offers the possibility of a permanent cure as it disrupts the propagation of abnormal electrical waves sustaining ventricular tachycardia. But this approach has achieved only modest success due to the failure to accurately identify targets for ablation. To address this problem, researchers recently introduced a personalized virtual-heart technology for guiding the ablation of ventricular tachycardia. The non-invasive approach, called virtual-heart arrhythmia ablation targeting (VAAT), uses cardiac imaging and computational modelling to predict the optimal ablation targets for each patient on a personalized virtual heart before the clinical procedure. The researchers tested the method in animals and patients. According to the authors, VAAT represents the first direct integration of computational modelling in cardiac patient care. Integrating image-based computational modelling into treatments for heart rhythm disorders could advance personalized approaches to heart disease. The study, which was partly funded by the NHLBI, was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.