INRIA’s Cardiac Research Gets Apple Boost

Profiles in Success: French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)

Ambitious research that could lead to significant improvements in the treatment of heart disease is being backed by the Apple Research & Technology Support (ARTS) programme. Based at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), the CardioSense3D project uses Apple technology to simulate the heart’s behaviour, producing detailed models to help doctors improve prevention of heart disease, diagnosis of symptoms and treatment of patient-specific cardiac problems.

“Support from Apple’s ARTS programme will give us the powerful computational network we need to simulate the complex behaviour of the heart”, says Dr Miguel A. Fernández, co-leader with Hervé Delingette of the CardioSense3D project.

“Apple’s robust systems will help us to perform numerical simulations including four physiological phenomena. The Mac’s easy-to-use presentational capabilities will also be invaluable in a project involving people from different INRIA teams”.

INRIA intends to be ‘a research institute at the heart of the information society’. Formed in 1967 by the French Government, it now employs nearly 3,000 scientists in six research units, working on 138 separate projects. It maintains strong international relations with other research bodies.

One of INRIA’s seven priorities is ‘modelling living structures and mechanisms’. The CardioSense3D project reflects growing interest in simulation of the heart and its functions, because of the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases in industrial nations, and because of the organ’s complexities.

The project also responds to a trend in medical practice towards more personalised approaches to prevention, diagnosis and therapy, based on ever larger and more complex sets of measurements. This trend requires scientists to produce new types of computational models, and involves high performance computing resources.

Formulating a computational model to help understanding of the heart function of a specific patient represents a particularly big challenge for researchers. Parameters for four different physiological phenomena have to be identified: electrophysiology, cardiac mechanics, myocardial perfusion and cardiac metabolism.

The four-year CardioSense3D project steps up to this challenge. It aims to build a cardiac simulator, data assimilation software that can estimate patient-specific parameters, and a number of applications to solve clinical problems related to the diagnosis or treatment of cardiac pathologies. The results could improve medical practice, provide help for other research into heart diagnosis and therapy, and advance knowledge of the heart’s physiology.

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