The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to create the Virtual Heart, an interactive, hierarchical finite element simulation tool to explore the structure-function relationship in healthy and diseased hearts. The human heart is a fascinating organ that pumps more than 6000 liters of blood through our body every day. Beating more than a billion times during an average lifetime, it provides a steady supply of oxygen and nutrition to all our tissues and organs. Not surprisingly, cardiac dysfunction may have devastating physiological consequences. Our goal is to establish experiments, models, and simulation tools to characterize the electro-active response of cardiac tissue. The Virtual Heart will provide substantial contributions including enhanced insight into excitation-contraction coupling on the cellular level, continuum models for electro-active materials on the organ level, and multi-scale approaches to link both scales. Our project will establish an entirely new way of thinking in cardiovascular medicine, inspired by predictive, patient-specific, simulation-based interventional planning.
Heart disease is the primary cause of death in industrialized nations, claiming more than 16 million lives worldwide each year. Despite tremendous scientific improvements, cardiovascular disease remains one of the most common, costly, disabling, and deadly medical conditions, generating and annual health care cost in excess of $430 billion. Providing new technologies to understand cardiac disease, this project will have direct social, economical, and educational impact. Socially, it will enhance medical care, lower mortality, and improve life and longevity. Economically, it may optimize medical treatment to significantly reduce health care costs. Educationally, through a planned museum exhibit, we will increase public awareness of risk factors that promote cardiac disease.
