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.
I got my Ph.D. in this industry as well(patient-specific cardiovascular modeling). I'm posting AC, but I'm not HawkeyeMI. There is definitely some work in this field that is probably not going to improve outcomes. Maybe the uncertainties of CT/MRI images produce simulated "outcomes" that don't match reality. Or maybe you get a good image, and do a simulation for a patient that needs a bypass graft. You find that the 'best' angle for the bypass graft in patient A is to be stitched on at 17 degrees from the native tissue, but that an error of more than a degree or two negates all benefit of your simulated result. Really, there are all kinds of reasons that efforts like this end up not being practical. Some work is so impractically expensive in terms of computational time that it will never see clinical usage for that fact alone. In defense of a lot of this, you can't really know what's workable without trying, and a lot of research codes are readily admitted to be more of a 'proof-of-concept' rather than 'ready-for-clinical-use-and-patents'. But I digress.
I've had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Trayanova speak at conferences. Conferences held in medical facilities with clinicians and surgeons speaking as well, not just computer modeling wonks. Her work really is very promising and appears to be further along than many others in this field. She has the respect of computer modellers and surgeons alike. I for one trust her if she says this is getting ready for a larger-scale rollout. She does comes off as a bit arrogant, but I'll afford her that.
Not all that response was intended for you, ShanghaiBill, but there were a couple other posts accusing her of being a walled-off engineer working in a vacuum. Thought I'd just post my point of view all in one place.