Simulia getting to the heart of cardiac research

BEATING HEART: Dassault Systèmes Simulia recently unveiled its Living Heart Project, which includes a 3-D model that captures the electrical and mechanical behavior of the heart more accurately than anything some researchers say they have seen before. / COURTESY DASSAULT SYSTEMES
BEATING HEART: Dassault Systèmes Simulia recently unveiled its Living Heart Project, which includes a 3-D model that captures the electrical and mechanical behavior of the heart more accurately than anything some researchers say they have seen before. / COURTESY DASSAULT SYSTEMES

Using knowledge of 3-D computer modeling honed over decades of work simulating cars and airplanes, one company with deep ties to Rhode Island now hopes to spark a profound shift in the way researchers and physicians study the human heart.
Dassault Systèmes Simulia, a Providence-based division of the international 3-D product-design software company, last month unveiled its Living Heart Project at a conference in the city.
Beating at the center of that project is a 3-D model that captures the electrical and mechanical behavior of the heart more accurately and completely than anything some researchers say they have seen before. Using the model in an immersive, virtual-reality environment, doctors, researchers, regulatory bodies and medical-device manufacturers can place themselves inside the heart to speed innovation and improve treatment, according to the company.
Steve Levine, senior director of Simulia portfolio management for Dassault, noted that the company’s initial simulation projects spun out of work done at Brown University and it has had a presence in Providence for 36 years.
“We’ve been a leader in 3-D design for heavy manufacturing,” Levine said. “Generally we keep to ourselves, keep our technology behind the scenes. But with the Living Heart Project we’re evolving our technology and understanding of the physics of machines to the human body.”
He added, “They’re still subject to the same laws of nature.”
The impetus of the project came out of Simulia’s work with the medical-device community that prompted a need for better understanding of how the many parts of the human heart behave and interact.
An estimated 95 percent of all new medical devices are not actually tested on humans before being approved for use, Levine said.
“It’s hard to find people who will let you do it,” Levine said. “They do their best with animal models. … Clearly there is a lot of room for improvement.” As a result, medical-device manufacturers have actually tried to limit the changes and innovations in new devices as a way to speed the regulatory process.
Taking medical stents as an example, Levine said that doctors now need to “eyeball” and estimate what the best new valve would be for a patient.
Ultimately, he said, Simulia hopes to let doctors not only take certain valves and insert them virtually to see how they will fit and react when heart muscles relax, but also to expand the options doctors consider.
And although the project now only has a generic version of the heart, Levine said it probably won’t be long before there is the ability to create more individualized versions.
“The critical element is for people to realize that this is a viable technology,” he said. The company last week could not discuss revenue projections for the project, but did say researchers are not being charged to help test its uses.
The concept is already generating some enthusiastic responses from within the medical community, with more than 18 member organizations and 60 outside specialists signing on to work with the Living Heart Project.
One of those involved in using the Living Heart model is Julius Guccione, a bio-mechanical engineer and professor in the Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine.
The new model represents a fairly massive increase in the information available to researchers, Guccione said.
“They’ve created a complete model of the entire heart,” he said. “I’ve been in this research area for 25 years … and the most I’ve ever modeled was two heart chambers at once.”
Noting that the Living Heart model includes all four heart valves and chambers, as well as incorporating some of the electrical properties of the heart as well as the mechanics, Guccione said, “Dassault Systèmes made this huge leap so now there are so many interesting things we can study.” In a very practical sense, the Living Heart has already made meaningful contributions to two studies by Guccione funded by the National Institutes of Health, with his efforts to study the overall effects of heart attacks on the entire organ advancing beyond what his original grant proposals promised in just the few months he’s had access to Simulia.
Guccione also had high praise for the Simulia team’s responsiveness, noting that their engineers have been very quick to incorporate new models published in medical journals into their simulations.
“They’re amazingly fast and thorough and always test it out before they provide the next model for us to use and evaluate,” he said.
He also noted that even simply at UCSF the ability to use a shared model of an entire heart has contributed to a better collaboration with cardiac surgeon Elaine Tseng, who is studying the treatment of Aortic Stenosis, the narrowing of a valve the heart uses to pump blood through the rest of the body.
“Elaine’s been working on developing, basically, a new arterial valve that can be put inside … with minimally invasive surgery,” he said. “Because Dassault Systèmes’ model included both things, there was a lot of information we learned in our research that we can combine into one platform.”
That ability to enhance collaboration among different groups of medical researchers is part of both the genesis and future of the Living Heart Project, Irvine said.
Because heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death worldwide, it’s also among the most studied medical problems, Irvine said.
So one of the Living Heart’s goals is to bring all the best science together in a single model.
“We know there are tens of thousands of people interested in doing things to help this science,” he said. “We hope to use this project as a vehicle to help convince people of what can be done.” •

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