Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The Carmen team develops and uses models and numerical methods in order to simulate the electrophysiology of the heart from the molecular to the whole-organ scale, and its relation to measurable signals inside the heart and on the body surface. It aims at

• improving understanding of normal and pathological cardiac electrophysiology,

• improving the efficiency and accuracy of numerical models, and

• exploitation of all available electrical signals for diagnosis, in particular for prediction of life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.

The numerical models used and developed by the team incorporate the gating dynamics of the ion channels in the cardiac cell membranes and the heterogeneities and coupling processes on the cellular scale into macroscopic reaction-diffusion models. At the same time we use reduced models to solve the inverse problems related to non-invasive electrical imaging of the heart.

The fields involved in our research are: ordinary and partial differential equations (PDE), inverse problems, numerical analysis, high-performance computing, image segmentation, and mesh construction.

A main goal of the team is to contribute to the work packages defined in the IHU LIRYC, an institute founded in 2011 that focuses on cardiac arrhythmia.

We cooperate with physiologists and cardiologists on several projects. The team is building new models and powerful simulation tools that will help to understand the mechanisms behind cardiac arrhythmias and to establish personalized and optimized treatments. A particular challenge consists in making the simulations reliable and accessible to the medical community.