The research project is about the establishment of a database of simulated hearts, each of them in one-to-one correspondence one of the real left heart of our database of healthy and diseased hearts acquired all through the past projects of the same group. Each model will be tested by comparison with its real avatar. The final goal of the project is setting up a crossing analysis within the digital database between simulated healthy and diseased hearts; it will allows us to catch the variances and invariances in heart mechanics in presence of different pathologies, and successively, to identify the determinants of the difference between a healthy and a diseased heart, based on mechanical elements.
The innovative characters of the research are both in the results we aim to get and in the investigation methods which will be used to get them.
The realization of a database of 194 digital hearts corresponding to different cardiac pathologies, is a challenge and is new. It will consent in the next future to discuss the differences among models which correspond to different diseased and healthy hearts. In particular, we have got both left ventricle and left atrium of each subject and this determines the challenging and unique possibility to investigate the whole left heart in heathy and diseased subjects. Hence, in the next future we aim to extend the target to comprehend the model of the whole left heart. At that point, we can investigate the mechanics of a high pressure chamber (left ventricle) together with that of a low pressure chamber (left atrium), and catch by modeling the small perturbations of the paired chambers which characterize the pathology .
The expected impact is the improvement of the knowledge of the mechanical behavior of the left heart during functional diseases. Also the capability to understand how small mechanical differences in the blood pressure and muscle contraction can deliver extremal situations such as hearts with impaired functionality due to pressure and volume overload will be greatly improved. Moreover, the digital database will allow to understand the role of the relative significance of the mechanical components which determine a specific pathology will contribute to lead cardiovascular researchers and medical device manufacturers on the shared mission to develop and validate digital human heart models.
Also the methods we are planning to use in a systematic way, based on the principal strain analysis we developed in the past, have never been used in a so large scale. A secondary impact of our research will be to prove as that analysis is quite robust and can be used to set up a similarity concept between real and digital hearts both in Controls and patients.
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