CIBC Highlights

SCI Home CIBC Home News Highlights

IMAGING MEETS ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY TO HELP PEOPLE WITH HEART TROUBLES

afib Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common—and perhaps most insidious—form of heart rhythm disturbance and treating it has become the focus of a group of bioengineers, imaging physicists, and physicians at the University of Utah.

In atrial fibrillation, the upper two chambers (the left and right atria) of the heart lose their synchronization and beat erratically and inefficiently. The same condition in the lower chambers (ventricles) of the heart is fatal within minutes and defibrillators are necessary to restore coordination. In the atria, death is by stealth and occurs over years, which is both good news and bad.

VISUALIZATION

vis

Attempting to display the entirety of a large volumetric dataset at one time would result in an overwhelming amount of information. Furthermore, visualization tools based on volume rendering present the user with a host of confusing options. We present ClearView, which provides a simplified volume visualization tool with a focus on doing what matters most: looking at your data. Users frequently want to direct the viewer's attention to a particular region of their volumes. With many volume rendering tools, this means setting up complex transfer functions to highlight the region of interest, with the unfortunate side effect of potentially affecting the larger image. ClearView allows the user to focus their visualization efforts on the area of their choice, while separating parameters for visualizing of surrounding data. This provides not only a simplified user interface, but finer-grained control over the final publication-quality visualization. Through advanced GPU rendering techniques, ClearView presents all of this to the user at highly interactive frame rates.

SIMULATION OF ELECTRIC STIMULATION FOR BONE GROWTH

osseo

Osseointegration is a surgical procedure that provides direct skeletal attachment between an implant and host tissue with proven success in dental, auricle, and transfemoral implants. However, one challenge with using natural biological fixation is attaining a strong skeletal interlock at the implant interface, a prerequisite for long-term implant function. Utilizing metallic implants as a means of biological fixation has been the objective of orthopedic surgeons over the past two centuries. However, controlling osteogenesis at the implant interface, which is essential for providing strong skeletal fixation, remains challenging. Regulated electrical stimulation has proven effective in fracture healing and non-traumatized bone models, but has not been investigated in a percutaneous osseointegrated implant system. One advantage of the veteran patient population is that an orthopedic implant protrudes from the residual limb functioning as an exoprosthesis attachment and may operate as a potential cathode for an external electrical stimulation device.

SUBJECT-SPECIFIC, MULTISCALE SIMULATION OF ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY: A SOFTWARE PIPELINE FOR IMAGE-BASED MODELS AND APPLICATION EXAMPLES

s-s-electro

Over the past year the CIBC, in partnership with our collaborators, has begun to introduce a generalized processing pipeline and associated software to the biomedical community. This work has been largely influenced by DBP collaborators such as those collaborating to develop optimization strategies for ICD placement in children; Dr. John Triedman at the Department of Cardiology, Children's Hospital Boston, Dr. Matthew Jolley, Stanford University Medical Center. and Drs. Elizabeth Saarel, Tom Pilcher, and Michael Puchalski, all from the Department of Cardiology at Primary Childrens' Hospital in Salt Lake City. Additionally, collaborative work with the goal of the making osseointegrated amputee implants part of an electrical system to accelerate skeletal attachment also influenced the creation of the pipeline described below; collaborators are Brad Isaacson, Dr. Joseph Webster, Dr. James Beck, and Dr. Roy Bloebaum from the Department of Veteran Affairs and University of Utah.