Interactive Training System for Interventional Electrocardiology Procedures

Abstract

Abstract. Recent progress in cardiac catheterization and devices allowed to develop new therapies for severe cardiac diseases like arrhythmias and heart failure. The skills required for such interventions are still very challenging to learn, and typically acquired over several years. Virtual reality simulators can reduce this burden by allowing to practice such procedures without consequences on patients. In this paper, we propose the first training system dedicated to cardiac electrophysiology, including pacing and ablation procedures. Our framework involves an efficient GPU-based electrophysiological model. Thanks to an innovative multithreading approach, we reach high computational performances that allow to account for user interactions in real-time. Based on a scenario of cardiac arrhythmia, we demonstrate the ability of the user-guided simulator to navigate inside vessels and cardiac cavities with a catheter and to reproduce an ablation procedure involving: extra-cellular potential measurements, endocardial surface reconstruction, electrophysiology mapping, radio-frequency (RF) ablation, as well as electrical stimulation. This works is a step towards computerized medical learning curriculum.

A direct Jacobian total Lagrangian explicit dynamics finite element algorithm for real‐time simulation of hyperelastic materials

“…It can be used to allow interactive design, analysis and optimization in computer-aided design 1 and manufacturing, 2 to enable real-time control of soft robots, 3 to permit real-time pose estimation for soft sensors, 4 and to achieve user interactions with deformable bodies in virtual-reality and augmented-reality environments. 5 The real-time and accurate simulation of nonlinear deformations is also essential to many biomedical applications such as patient-specific whole-body image registration, 6 intraoperative brain-shift compensation, 7 virtual training for electrocardiology procedures, 8 and real-time surgical simulation of cataract surgery, laparoscopic surgery, and tumor removal. 9 Currently, many of the reported numerical algorithms are mainly focused on the improvement of numerical accuracy 10,11 and convergence, 12 with fewer considerations on computational efficiency.…”