01 Dec Living Heart Human Model

Join the Computer Simulations (FEA, CFD) for Life Sciences and Medical devices webinar to understand how you can tackle your cardiovascular challenges.

Click Here, Here and Here to have access to the living heart flyer, an introduction ppt and scientific publications.

Heart/cardiovascular diseases

Heart diseases, also known as cardiovascular diseases, encompass a range of conditions that affect the heart and blood vessels. These diseases can involve the heart muscle, blood vessels, valves, or electrical pathways within the heart. Heart diseases are a leading cause of death worldwide, and they can manifest in various forms. Here’s an overview of some common types of heart diseases

• Coronary Artery Disease (CAD)
• Heart Attack (Myocardial Infarction)
• Heart Failure
• Arrhythmias
• Valvular Heart Diseases
• Hypertensive Heart Disease
• Cardiomyopathies
• Congenital Heart Defects

Preventive measures and lifestyle changes, such as maintaining a healthy diet, regular exercise, not smoking, and managing stress, can significantly reduce the risk of developing heart diseases. Early detection and appropriate medical interventions are crucial for managing and treating heart conditions.

The Living Heart Human Model

The Living Heart Model, developed by Dassault Systèmes with Research, Industry, Clinicians and Regulatory, is a digital representation of the human heart that can simulate its behavior in real-time. Here are some reasons why such a model might be used:

Medical Research and Development

Understanding Physiology: The Living Heart Model allows researchers and medical professionals to simulate the physiological behavior of the heart. This can be valuable for understanding normal heart function and studying how different conditions or diseases affect the heart.
Drug Development: Pharmaceutical companies can use the model to simulate the effects of new drugs on the heart. This aids in the development of medications, ensuring their safety and efficacy before conducting clinical trials.

Medical Education

Training Healthcare Professionals: The model can serve as an educational tool for training healthcare professionals, including cardiologists, surgeons, and medical students. It provides a dynamic and interactive platform for learning about cardiac anatomy, function, and various pathologies.
Simulation of Procedures: Healthcare professionals can use the Living Heart Model to simulate and practice various cardiac procedures, such as surgeries or interventions. This virtual practice enhances their skills and helps in better preparation for real-world scenarios.

Clinical Decision Support

Treatment Planning: For patients with heart conditions, the Living Heart Model can aid in treatment planning. Healthcare providers can use the model to simulate different treatment options and choose the most suitable approach based on the patient’s specific cardiac anatomy and physiology.
Patient Education: The model can be used to visually explain complex cardiac conditions to patients. This helps in enhancing patient understanding and involvement in decision-making regarding their treatment.

Personalized Medicine

Tailored Treatment Plans: With advancements in technology, personalized medicine is becoming increasingly important. The Living Heart Model allows for the creation of personalized digital twins of patients’ hearts. This can help in tailoring treatment plans based on an individual’s unique cardiac characteristics.

Device Design and Testing

Implantable Devices: Companies designing and manufacturing cardiac devices, such as pacemakers or artificial heart valves, can use the model to simulate the interaction between these devices and the heart. This aids in designing more effective and safer medical devices.
In summary, the Living Heart Model from Dassault Systèmes serves as a versatile tool with applications in medical research, education, clinical decision support, personalized medicine, and medical device design. Its dynamic and interactive nature allows for a better understanding of cardiac anatomy and function, leading to improved patient care and outcomes.

Living heart project

The living heart human model is developed in the last decade during the living heart project.
The Living Heart Project (from which 4RealSim is an active member) is uniting leading cardiovascular researchers, educators, medical device developers, regulatory agencies, and practicing cardiologists on a shared mission to develop and validate highly accurate personalized digital human heart models. These models will establish a unified foundation for cardiovascular in silico medicine and serve as a common technology base for education and training, medical device design, testing, clinical diagnosis and regulatory science —creating an effective path for rapidly translating current and future cutting edge innovations directly into improved patient care.

The Living Heart Project is driven by a growing ecosystem that is fueling the collaborative development of validated, commercially available heart models and exploring novel digital therapies. The Living Heart Project signed a five-year collaborative research agreement with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Together with the Project participants listed below, testing paradigms beginning with the insertion, placement and performance of pacemaker leads and other cardiovascular devices are being evaluated, bringing the Living Heart Project closer to providing personalized, interventional cardiac-patient care.

The collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was recently extended for an additional five-years to spur medical device innovation by enabling innovative, new product designs. This second phase of this ongoing collaboration supports the 21st Century Cures Act, using virtual patients based on computational modeling and simulation to improve efficiency of clinical trials for new device designs. A groundbreaking project with the Living Heart simulated 3D heart model will examine the use of heart simulation as a source of digital evidence for new cardiovascular device approvals. This includes an in silico clinical trial aimed to reduce animal testing or the number of patients required while still ensuring safety and efficacy of the device is demonstrated. The new digital process is intended to be more efficient and less expensive than current ones – whose delays and costs can impede patient access to novel treatments – without losing rigor or confidence in a device’s safety and efficacy. Researchers hope the first-of-its-kind process will increase industry innovation and pave the way for an efficient path for patients to access safe, effective new treatments for the world’s leading cause of death – heart disease.

Living heart human model – Commercially available for all customers

The Living Heart Human Model role option is a breakthrough human heart model able to simulate the realistic electromechanical behavior of a beating human heart. It accelerates the development of safer and more effective cardiovascular devices (such as artificial valves and stents) as well as rhythm management devices (such as implantable defibrillators and RF ablators) by providing a virtual human heart capable of testing the efficacy and safety of new designs. With this solution, it is feasible to test scenarios difficult if not impossible to test in the lab, and do so in a day vs one to two months with bench or animal testing, at a fraction of the cost.

The living heart human model customers get access to

• Living Heart Human Model (LHHM). A comprehensive anatomy of the heart including 4 chambers, 4 heart valves, coronary artery and vein. This model is suitable for mechanical and electrical applications.
• Living Left Heart Model (LHM). This model includes a fully morphable CAD model of the Left Ventricle, Left Atrium, Mitral Valve and Chordae. This model is suitable for mechanical applications only and can be modified and parametrized to accommodate patient or disease-specific conditions.
• Simulation Process. The simulation process captures the knowledge and knowhow for simulating the electromechanical functioning of a beating heart. This simulation process delivers the complex multi-physics modeling methodology and facilitates the rapid onboarding and technology adoption for both, new and existing customers.

Some of the key technological highlights delivered as part of the knowledge and knowhow in these two models are

• Anatomically realistic CAD model of healthy 4-chambered adult human heart
• Calibrated models for cardiac tissue electrical and mechanical response including fiber orientations, for active and passive responses
• Electrical pathways defined via Purkinje fibers and Bundle of His
• Simulation-ready models with three mesh densities, predefined boundary conditions, and vascular network model
• Physiologically realistic dynamic heart behavior including electrical excitation, cardiac motion (and stresses/strains), and blood flow
• Interactive visualization to observe dynamic cardiac motion, stresses, strains, and propagation of electrical signals

Living heart model scientific papers and marketing material

Click Here, Here and Here to have access to the living heart flyer, an introduction ppt and scientific publications.

Do you need more info?

If you need more info, do not hesitate to contact us or write us an email to sales@4realsim.com

Join the Computer Simulations (FEA, CFD) for Life Sciences and Medical devices webinar to understand how you can tackle your cardiovascular challenges.