VIRTUAL HEART MODELS: MULTI-PHYSICS APPROACHES TO COMPUTATIONAL CARDIOLOGY

Objective

Heart disease is the number one cause of death in industrialized nations. Despite the broad class of treatment techniques such as medication, surgery and tissue-engineered therapies, heart disease remains to be one of the most frequent, disabling, and life-threatening diseases. In Europe it accounts for almost half of overall annual mortality rate. In the European Union (EU) alone, cardiovascular disease causes over 2 million deaths per year. The cost of cardiovascular disease to the EU economy is €192 billion per year. As opposed to the traditional trial-and-error based therapies, a systematic, personalized simulation-aided approach offers a great potential for understanding, diagnosing, and treating heart failure through the sound understanding of functional and structural changes in the infarcted tissue and the computational tools of multi-scale solid mechanics. The proposed research aims: (1) to develop multi-scale models of computational cardiac electrophysiology, (2) to model the fully coupled electromechanics of the heart through a novel micro-structurally based kinematic approach, (3) to couple the electromechanical computational tool with the ionic models of cardiac electrophysiology, (4) to employ the new multi-scale tools of computational cardiology to explore the underlying complex mechanisms of heart diseases and thereby guide personalized cardiac therapies. The anticipated outcomes are: (A) a multi-scale computational electrophysiological tool that incorporates multi-physics ionic models in the implicit bidomain framework, (B) a better understanding of underlying physiological reasons for electrophysiological cardiac disease such as arrhythmia, left and right bundle blocks, (C) a novel, micro-structurally based, computationally efficient, modular electromechanical computational tool, (D) a virtual test environment for the patient-specific optimization of cardiac therapies and surgical procedures.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• medical and health sciences clinical medicine cardiology cardiovascular diseases cardiac arrhythmia
• medical and health sciences basic medicine pharmacology and pharmacy pharmaceutical drugs
• medical and health sciences clinical medicine surgery surgical procedures
• natural sciences computer and information sciences computational science multiphysics
• natural sciences physical sciences classical mechanics solid mechanics

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG - Marie-Curie Action: "Career Integration Grants"

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-CIG - Support for training and career development of researcher (CIG)

Coordinator