AIMBE
Electrophysiologist Jonathan Chrispin, MD, wanted to do more.
He was standing in the electrophysiology lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, catheter in hand, about to ablate a patient’s ventricular tachycardia (VT) — a potentially fatal arrhythmia caused by electrical circuits looping through scar tissue left behind by a heart attack. In a standard procedure, Chrispin would spend 5-8 hours mapping the scar point by point and burning through it with a 3.5 mm catheter tip. The success rate hovers around 50%-60%. Many patients come back for a second ablation. Some come back for a third or fourth.
But this time, the targets had already been chosen. Before Chrispin entered the room, a team led by biomedical engineer Natalia Trayanova, PhD, had built a computational replica of the patient’s heart from a contrast-enhanced MRI scan — scar, border zones, healthy muscle, all mapped in three dimensions… Continue reading.
