Follow your heart: How medical imaging can help our cardiac health

Arrhythmias (heart rhythm problems) resulting from severe heart conditions kill 100,000 people in the UK every year. Although catheter ablation (a semi-invasive procedure to stop abnormal electrical pathways in the heart) remains the only potential curative treatment for arrhythmias, it has achieved only modest efficacy owing to the limitations of current clinical mapping techniques. In this talk I will describe how we use computer simulations to optimize mapping techniques, improving the outcome of the procedure and, consequently, the patient's life quality.

The diagnosis of hypertension comes down to two numbers: diastolic and systolic blood pressure, the respective minimum and maximum of the blood pressure wave. Yet, the whole pressure wave holds much more information that can help not only to understand the underlying causes of hypertension, but also offer new treatment targets. In this talk, we’ll explore the different theories behind the origin of high blood pressure (arterial VS cardiac theories) and highlight how new methodologies can inform this debate and offer a more comprehensive approach to the diagnosis of hypertension.

Defibrillation involves the application of a strong electrical shock across the heart to terminate lethal cardiac arrhythmias. Despite being one of the most revolutionary life-saving advances of the 20th century, it is far from an optimal therapy. I will describe how we develop and use detailed computational cardiac models to understand how electric fields interact with cardiac tissue and how such modelling can be used to help optimise the design of automated defibrillators, saving lives and increasing the quality of life of device recipients.