Slashdot Mirror
Why Every Cardiac Patient Needs a Virtual Heart
the_newsbeagle writes: In the latest high-tech approach to personalized medicine, cardiologists can now create a computer model of an individual patient's heart and use that simulation to make a treatment plan. In this new field of computational medicine, doctors use a patient's MRI scans to make a model showing that patient's unique anatomy and pattern of heart disease. They can then experiment on that virtual organ in ways they simply can't with a flesh-and-blood heart. Proponents say this tech can "improve therapies, minimize the invasiveness of diagnostic procedures, and reduce health-care costs" in cardiology.
Or just those who can afford to pay for this?
Oh, that's right, in America, the poor are expected to just hurry up and die instead of getting good treatment.
And you clowns think this is the natural order of things.
Assholes. It's your rich libertarians who need to be allowed to die.
The cost of alternative treatments is set based on the cost of the original treatment. Just because it is cheaper to produce doesn't mean that the cost to the end recipient is going to reflect that. If there is a $200,000 surgery to correct your defect, and for $180,000 we can cure you without surgery, that $18,000 sounds like a bargain. There is no effective competition, so whether that cure costs $100 or $10,000, the $180k price will stick. Of course, if surgery isn't necessary, we could do the procedure to more borderline cases - ones that might never need surgery. If we catch just 15% extra people that would have opted out of surgery, we have spent more money.
I'm not convinced that a cardiac surgeon is going to cost less if he spends 8 hours experimenting on a heart and 4 hours in surgery vs 2 hours reviewing current imaging data and 6 hours in surgery.
As someone who works with computational models, knowing the exact answer is not always going to lead to a more effective or useful result in the field. Knowing you need a 1.77245 mm incision has little value over knowing that a 1.8mm incision will work with a scalpel operator which is only accurate to 0.2mm. There will always be shoulder cases where it may make a difference, but are you willing to pay 3X the cost for every procedure to cover the 10% in which it might make a difference? (That's a trick question, by the way, because you aren't paying, your insurance company is - and I can almost guarantee what their answer will be)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I've been trying to think of a good term for biomed that can actually make predictions (ie is like the original use of the term science). This is a good one.
They forgot to provide a reference to this:
So call off the search. All are now dead. Bye Professor. I hardly knew you.
This research was obviously done by engineering PhD types with no clinical experience in actual health care. Same old song of meaningless
press releases of work done by well-meaning but entirely clueless individuals who have no direct knowledge of the problem space. It was that
way nearly 40 years ago when I was a grad student in Bioengineering, and it is still that way as I complete a 30 year career as a physician.
BTW Cardiologists don't do surgery, surgeons do. Cardiologists most manipulate tiny catheters into your wallet to extract whatever coin of the realm
might be blocking the flow of commerce.
the headline would have been, "Researchers improve their simulations significantly when perfecting their vision on random patients' live, beating hearts."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I fail to see how this helps most heart patients.
If you need a stent placed in a heart artery, it's done with simple X-rays and X-ray dye. MRI is both unnecessary and extremely impractical.
If you need heart surgery, most surgeons can obtain all the information needed from standard imaging procedures. Building an expensive model doesn't really change much.
Finally, most of cardiology is done with medications rather than surgery or stents. With this in mind, detailed anatomical studies aren't really needed.
There might be some niche applications for this, such as congenital anomalies where standard anatomy doesn't apply. However, this is a miniscule fraction of all heart patients, and hardly something every patient needs.
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
(virtual hearts for cardiac patients)
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I used to work in the "new" field of computational medicine about 15 years. (Is 15 years new? I don't think so - and some of those heart models well before my time.) The Cardiac Mechanics Computational Group at UCSD, if anyone cares.
Personalized medicine was a very big driver for the models we were working on. You could introduce ischemias or other defects into the modeled heart tissue and observe how it changed the propagation of potentials across the tissue surfaces.
I personally worked on smaller models of just one heart cell, with the purpose being that you could see what the impact various drugs would have without needing to do millions of dollars of testing. Got a drug you know will change the sodium permiability or whatever? Alter the constant in the model, and run it. Proctor and Gamble funded the research that funded me, and was pretty happy with the results, I think.