CAREER: The Virtual Heart - Exploring the Structure-function Relationship in Electroactive Cardiac Tissue

这个教师早期职业发展（Career）奖的研究目标是创建虚拟心脏，一个互动的，分层的有限元模拟工具，以探索健康和患病心脏的结构-功能关系。人类的心脏是一个迷人的器官，每天向我们的身体输送超过6000升的血液。心脏在平均一生中跳动超过10亿次，为我们所有的组织和器官提供稳定的氧气和营养。毫不奇怪，心功能障碍可能会造成毁灭性的生理后果。我们的目标是建立实验、模型和仿真工具来表征心脏组织的电活动反应。虚拟心脏将提供实质性的贡献，包括增强对细胞水平上的兴奋-收缩耦合的洞察力，器官水平上电活性物质的连续体模型，以及连接两个尺度的多尺度方法。我们的项目将在心血管医学中建立一种全新的思维方式，其灵感来自于预测性的、针对患者的、基于模拟的介入计划。在工业化国家，心脏病是导致死亡的主要原因，每年夺去全世界1600多万人的生命。尽管科学取得了巨大进步，但心血管疾病仍然是最常见、最昂贵、最致残和最致命的疾病之一，每年产生的医疗费用超过4300亿美元。提供新的技术来了解心脏疾病，这个项目将有直接的社会、经济和教育影响。在社会方面，它将加强医疗保健，降低死亡率，延长寿命。在经济上，它可以优化医疗，显著降低医疗成本。在教育方面，我们将通过计划中的博物馆展览，提高公众对导致心脏病的危险因素的认识。

The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to create the Virtual Heart, an interactive, hierarchical finite element simulation tool to explore the structure-function relationship in healthy and diseased hearts. The human heart is a fascinating organ that pumps more than 6000 liters of blood through our body every day. Beating more than a billion times during an average lifetime, it provides a steady supply of oxygen and nutrition to all our tissues and organs. Not surprisingly, cardiac dysfunction may have devastating physiological consequences. Our goal is to establish experiments, models, and simulation tools to characterize the electro-active response of cardiac tissue. The Virtual Heart will provide substantial contributions including enhanced insight into excitation-contraction coupling on the cellular level, continuum models for electro-active materials on the organ level, and multi-scale approaches to link both scales. Our project will establish an entirely new way of thinking in cardiovascular medicine, inspired by predictive, patient-specific, simulation-based interventional planning. Heart disease is the primary cause of death in industrialized nations, claiming more than 16 million lives worldwide each year. Despite tremendous scientific improvements, cardiovascular disease remains one of the most common, costly, disabling, and deadly medical conditions, generating and annual health care cost in excess of $430 billion. Providing new technologies to understand cardiac disease, this project will have direct social, economical, and educational impact. Socially, it will enhance medical care, lower mortality, and improve life and longevity. Economically, it may optimize medical treatment to significantly reduce health care costs. Educationally, through a planned museum exhibit, we will increase public awareness of risk factors that promote cardiac disease.