Ronald Berger, professor in Cardiology, and the clinical cardiac electrophysiology group joined a collaboration with Natalia Trayanova, professor of Biomedical Engineering with a joint appointment in the Division of Cardiology, and her lab to perform catheter ablation of cardiac arrhythmias including atrial fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. For both of these arrhythmia conditions, it is often challenging to determine the appropriate sites for successful ablation. Natalia and her group have developed novel algorithms for processing MRI scans obtained in these patients to determine sites of myocardial scar and predicting locations of reentrant and focal drivers of the arrhythmias. Ron's group then uses this information to help plan and guide ablation procedures. They are pursuing separate and parallel clinical trials testing the ablation success in atrial fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia, incorporating the guidance for individual patients from the models produced in Natalia’s lab.
This project perfectly demonstrates the potential for collaboration with members of the Whiting School of Engineering that we hoped our recent partnership in the Research Retreat would promote.
