Mechanics and Computation / View source

for Imaging and Modeling of Cardiac Cells and Tissues
==Frank Sachse, Ph.D.==

===Imaging and Modeling of Cardiac Cells and Tissues===

Imaging and modeling are major research approaches to provide insights into structure and function of the cardiovascular system (1). This talk will focus on microscopic imaging and computational modeling of cardiac cells and tissues.
In the first part of the talk, we will introduce approaches based on confocal microscopy for studying microstructure of cardiac tissues and cells. Several major diseases are associated with alterations of microstructure, for instance hypertrophy, infarction and ischemia. We will describe methods to construct three-dimensional spatial models of cells, cell segments and cell clusters (2,3), which are suitable for computational simulations and quantitative characterization. We will present a novel approach for in vivo imaging of tissue microstructure using catheter-based confocal imaging systems and a method to locally introduce fluorescent dyes(3).
The second part of the talk will cover approaches for computational modeling of function of cardiac cells and tissues. We will present results from our studies on ion channel mutations and their effects on electrophysiology of cardiac cells (4), multi-domain modeling of electrical conduction in cardiac tissue (5), and cardiac electro-mechanics1.
We conclude that the presented approaches for imaging and modeling not only provide insights into physiology and structure of normal cells and tissues, but also in their pathophysiology and disease associated structural remodeling. We suggest that these approaches will allow for prediction of courses of diseases and devising therapies for their treatment. 

(1) F. B. Sachse. Computational Cardiology: Modeling of Anatomy, Electrophysiology, and Mechanics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2966, 1-322, 2004.

(2) E. Savio-Galimberti, J. Frank, M. Inoue, J. I. Goldhaber, M. B. Cannell, J. H. B. Bridge, and F. B. Sachse. Novel features of the rabbit transverse tubular system revealed by quantitative analysis of three-dimensional reconstructions from confocal images. Biophys J, 95:2053-62, 2008.

(3) R. Lasher, R. W. Hitchcock, and F. B. Sachse. Towards modeling of cardiac micro-structure with catheter-based confocal microscopy: a novel approach for dye delivery and tissue characterization. IEEE Trans Med Imaging, 28(8):1156-64, 2009.

(4) I. Splawski, K. W. Timothy, N. Decher, P. Kumar, F. B. Sachse, A. H. Beggs, M. C. Sanguinetti, and M. T. Keating. Severe arrhythmia disorder caused by cardiac l-type calcium channel mutations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 102(23):8089–96, 2005. 

(5) F. B. Sachse, A. P. Moreno, G. Seemann, and J. A. Abildskov. A model of electrical conduction in cardiac tissue including fibroblasts. Ann Biomed Eng, 37(5):874-89, 2009.
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