Section: New Results

Electrophysiology

Cardiac arrhythmia is a very frequent pathology that comes from an abnormal electrical activity in the myocardium. This work aims at developing a training simulator for interventional radiology and thermo-ablation of these arrhythmias. After tackling the issue of fast electrophysiology, a first version of our training simulator was proposed.

Figure 3. Cardiac electrophysiology computed on a patient-specific geometry

The first main contribution of this work is the interactive catheter navigation inside a moving venous system and a beating heart. The virtual catheterization reproduces navigation issues that can be solved using a bending catheter. Second, our real-time GPU electrophysiology model allows interactions during the simulation such as extra-cellular potential measurement, RF ablation, and electrical stimulation. An innovative management of the computational units based on multithreading offers performances close to real-time. This framework is therefore a substantial step towards realistic and highly efficient virtual training systems in cardiology. As future work, we intend to use patient-specific data in our framework so that cardiologists could quantitatively assess the realism of our virtual training.

Figure 4. The first simulation dedicated to electrocardiology training

(a) Setup of the System (b) Simulation of Catheter Navigation (c) Electrophysiological Signals