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

这项教师早期职业发展(Career)奖的研究目标是创建虚拟心脏，这是一种交互式、层次化的有限元模拟工具，用于探索健康和患病心脏的结构-功能关系。人类的心脏是一个令人着迷的器官，每天通过我们的身体输送超过6000升的血液。它在平均寿命中跳动超过10亿次，为我们所有的组织和器官提供稳定的氧气和营养供应。不足为奇的是，心脏功能障碍可能会产生毁灭性的生理后果。我们的目标是建立实验、模型和模拟工具来表征心脏组织的电活性反应。虚拟心脏将提供实质性的贡献，包括在细胞水平上增强对兴奋-收缩耦合的洞察，在器官水平上为电活性物质建立连续模型，以及将两个尺度联系起来的多尺度方法。我们的项目将在心血管医学中建立一种全新的思维方式，灵感来自于预测性的、针对患者的、基于模拟的介入计划。心脏病是工业化国家的主要死亡原因，每年夺走全球1600多万人的生命。尽管有了巨大的科学进步，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。该项目提供了了解心脏病的新技术，将产生直接的社会、经济和教育影响。在社会上，它将加强医疗保健，降低死亡率，并提高寿命和寿命。在经济上，它可能会优化医疗，大幅降低医疗成本。在教育方面，我们将通过计划中的博物馆展览，提高公众对促进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.