Researchers from King’s College London (KCL) have been using mathematical techniques and Computed Tomography (CT) images to create 3D replicas of full-size healthy adult hearts.
The study is a collaboration between King’s, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Graz in Austria and Liryc – the Electrophysiology and Heart Modelling Institute in France.
According to KCL, synthetic hearts can be used for simulations, tests and statistical analyses. They will also allow experts to use the models to generate different shaped, ‘abnormal’ or ‘extreme’ hearts for research purposes. Exaggerated changes mentioned include bigger or smaller hearts, or ones with thicker walls.
Researchers wanted to find out how heart shapes could be linked to disease, and to enable others to replicate the work. As per King’s, the collaborative study used a cohort of 20 healthy adult hearts to create an ‘average’ heart which they could then ‘deform’ to generate 1,000 new synthetic hearts.
Lead researcher Cristobal Rodero, said: “Even in healthy people, everyone has a slightly different heart shape. Knowing these differences and how they affect cardiac function is a task for which computer simulations are an ideal tool.
“This research could be used as an early diagnosis later down the track. For instance, we found that there is an area in the heart right before the aorta that when it gets thicker, it has a big impact in the simulations.
“That has been linked before with hypertrophy. We could see that as a biomarker while it was already known, with the statistical shape analysis, now there are more areas of the heart that can be linked to help the early diagnosis.”
Crucially, the models are ‘open access’ – meaning researchers can download them to use for research or to replicate results, as part of a wider move towards more ‘reproducibility in the field’.
To find out more about the study, visit the KCL website.
