New research project - Enabled Heart

Enabled Heart - Anatomy and physiology-based environments for cardiac implant development

Since June 2023, the Enabled Heart project has been funded by the Europäische Fonds für regionale Entwicklung (EFRE). The project is expected to run until May 2026. The goal of the project is to create virtual and physical development tools that will allow research and development work on medical heart implants to be tested on a realistic model before being tested on animals. This should enable a reduction in development time as well as development costs through early testing of new concepts. The virtual and physical development tools must be intertwined to enable the plausibility and continuous validation required in medical technology. While this is normally achieved through animal testing, the tools/methods should allow visualization and testing simply by incorporating isolated animal or human hearts.

Two research groups at ICM are working closely with the companies, Biotronik and LB-Engineering, as well as cardiologists at DHZC on this project.

In this project, the laboratory for biofluid mechanics of the ICM has its focus on the concept development and the construction of a multifunctional in-vitro experimental stand for the physiological simulation of cardiac motion. In this trainer it should be possible to use different hearts and heart models, as well as the option to extend a vascular model.

The ICM's Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation group is developing a shape model of the heart. This shape model allows the complex anatomy of the heart, which varies greatly between individual patients, to be described in a simplified and, above all, uniform manner. By means of the shape model, the entire diversity of cardiac anatomies can be represented and taken into account in further simulation methods, for example for the conduction or contraction of the heart.

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