Students from the Medical Image Processing for Guidance and Navigation course visited Getinge, a global leader in Hybrid Operating Room development. The visit offered valuable insights into advanced surgical technologies and their practical applications in modern healthcare.

The openCARP cardiac electrophysiology simulator openCARP developed by IBT and collaborators won the Helmholtz Software Award in the Newcomer category. The award aims to promote the development of professional and high-quality research software and to recognize the commitment to software as the basis of modern science.
[more@Helmholtz]

Prof. Dr. Olaf Dössel was elected spokesperson for the health technologies thematic network at acatech. acatech is the German Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Olaf Dössel also received the KIT Verdienstnadel (KIT Medal of Merit). With this, KIT honors his diverse activities as an ambassador for KIT and as honorary chairman of the Studierendenwohnheim e.V. des KIT (KIT Student Residence Association).

A new course for Master Students will be offered since WS 24/25 from IBT lectures. The course, titled “Medical Image Processing for guidance and navigation”, will be worth 9 ECTs for a total of 6 hours per week of lectures/practical exercises plus the accomplishment of a group project.
Link to Campus Management für Studierende

From September 26 to 28, the DGK Herztage took place in Hamburg – a platform for exchanging the latest insights, innovative solutions, and valuable experiences in the field of cardiology. Christian and Silvia represented the IBT with a poster and two presentations.

This years Cardiac Physiome Workshop 2024 took place from September 12 to 14, where around 140 researchers engaged on integrating experimental and mathematical approaches to advance cardiac physiology research. In addition to three posters from our group, the contribution of our PhD student Stephanie Appel was selected for a presentation. Our PhD student Jonathan Krauß won the poster award.

The state of Baden-Württemberg would like to thank Irenen Günter for her forty years of service in the public service. The certificate of thanks was presented to her by Professor Werner Nahm in the presence of her colleagues. We wish her all the best for her future endeavors.

Julian Mierisch is working on model-informed machine learning for the prediction of postoperative atrial fibrillation and its targeted prevention. His focus areas were Data Science and Software Engineering.

From June 17th to June 21st, Stephanie and Silvia attended the Summer School in Bordeaux to deepen their knowledge of cardiac electrophysiology. Engaging lectures and an interactive lab tour at Liryc made this week a remarkable experience.

In this study by Oxford University and KIT, various therapies were systematically investigated in 800 virtual patients with atrial fibrillation. The study aims to assign patients in whom pulmonary vein isolation was not successful as an initial therapy to optimal pharmacological and ablation therapies on the basis of in-silico tests. Treatment strategies vary depending on atrial size and the presence of low-voltage areas. In-silico models are a promising tool for individual therapy optimization in atrial fibrillation.

From June 2 to June 4, the Fickle Heart Workshop took place at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Science in Cambridge, focusing on digital twins, artificial intelligence and uncertainty quantification tools for calibration and forecasting. Axel, Patricia and Stephanie took the opportunity of this workshop to present their work in this field.

In this year’s European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) conference in Lisbon, our PhD student Joshua Steyer presented his results on electrograms in a cell-to-cell cardiac model within the "Computational Cardiology: Modeling and Simulating the Heart" mini-symposium.

During April the conference of the German society of cardiology (DGK) and the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) took place bringing together cardiologists from Germany and around the world. On the 7th-9th The European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) conference took place in Berlin. Our PhD student Patricia Martínez was nominated for the Young Investigator Award in the Basic and Translational Science category and presented her work on the effects of right atrial arrhythmia susceptibility in patient-specific computer models.

In this year’s Biosignals Workshop in Göttingen, we presented our work on electrograms in a cell-by-cell model. We have shown that healthy excitation propagation, as opposed to what we would expect in homogenised models, yields asymmetric electrograms exhibiting several small deflections. These deflections, in turn, can be explained by the multimodality of cell activation as well as the deceleration of the excitation wave when transitioning between two cardiac cells.

A new course for Master Students will be offered since SS24 from IBT lectures. The course, titled “Medical Image Processing for guidance and navigation”, will be worth 6 ECTs for a total of 4 hours per week of lectures/practical exercises plus the accomplishment of a group project.
The language of the lecture is English.

This open access book has brought together 138 experts in In Silico Trials working in academia, the medical industry, regulatory bodies, hospitals, and consulting firms. Through a consensus process, these experts produced the first attempt to define some Good Simulation Practices on how to develop, evaluate, and use In Silico Trials.  Good Simulation Practice constitutes an indispensable guide for anyone who is planning to engage at any title with In Silico Trials. IBT researcher Axel Loewe has co-edited the chapters Model Development and The Investigator: Modellers and Analysts.

Together with our collaborators at the Institute for Applied and Numerical Mathematics, we investigated the impact of modeling choices such as mesh size, incompressibility constraint, active strain or active stress as well as the choice of the damping scheme. Click here to learn about our findings: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gamm.202370010

Which effects does the mechanical activation of the heart cause on the electrical control of cardiac rhythm and excitation? Using the fully coupled electro-mechanical computer model of the heart developed at IBT, we showed that mechano-electric feedback changes activation and repolarization patterns throughout the heart during sinus rhythm and leads to a markedly more heterogeneous electrophysiological substrate. Read the full study published open access in The Journal of Physiology.