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Simulating cardiac arrest enables targeted treatment

January 17, 2002

Treating a victim of cardiac arrest demands a rapid response. A new computer simulation of the heart is enabling physicists to help doctors make the best clinical decisions.

When you have had a cardiac arrest doctors may have to act instantly if they are going to keep you alive. There is no time to try out two or three ideas to see which would be best. A new computer simulation of the heart now allows doctors and physicists to model the faulty heart beats (arrhythmias) that can cause cardiac arrest, and run episodes of arrhythmia time and again, looking for the best way of treating it.

Speaking today (23 January) at the Institute of Physics Simulation and Modelling Applied to Medicine conference in London, Richard Clayton from the University of Leeds will present an overview of the project and demonstrate how his team`s physics-based understanding of the heart could lead to improved treatment.

"During a healthy heart beat a wave of electrical activity sweeps through the heart muscle, moving from the inside towards the outer surface making the heart start to contract, before dying away. During cardiac arrest this normal pattern is disturbed. The electrical activity fails to die away properly, and moves around the muscle in a turbulent pattern causing an arrhythmia known as ventricular fibrillation," explains Clayton. "Our detailed biophysical and anatomical model can simulate this activity and we can then test different pharmacological and physical treatments that could help the patient."

The simulation requires massive computing power, and even using high-speed equipment it takes 24 hours to simulate a second of heart activity.

The end result, however, is a sequence of colour images of the beating heart, showing the pattern of electrical activity, and enabling researchers to visualise the effects of different therapies.

"At the same time we can simulate the electrical signals that would be detected by external monitoring devices, and show how the particular state of the heart would appear in a clinical electrocadiogram trace," says Clayton. This allows their simulation system to provide information that will assist in day-to-day care of patients who are prone to ventricular fibrillation following a heart attack.

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