Friendly Paper Review - Precision medicine in human heart modeling
Have you heard about precision medicine??
Wow! At least until I read this article me neither. But we should!
I will be reviewing and summarizing the following paper, which is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between many entities and universisties:
I saw a post on Linkeding from Mathias Peirlinck, Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University, dept. Mechanical Engineering which seemed very intersting. Talking about Computational Heart Modeling applied to Precision Medicine and it caught my attention.
I was not aware of how important and exciting this topic was! It is something that will change the way medicine currently works, for the better!
Precision medicine consists on applying scientific methods to customize medical treatment for each individual depending on their genetics, anatomy, physiology and lifestyle.
Why is it so important??
- Enable cost effective solutions
- Allow quality of life
- Reduce mortality
What are it applications?
- Diagnosis
- Device design
- Treatment planning
- Prognosis (doctor’s judgment of the expected development of a disease or of the chances of getting better.)
Why is it unknown? Still not applicable??
In order to apply Precision Medicine it is currently required to have available a fully personalized, high-resolution whole heart model with an entire personalized medical history.
….or not???
This article they proposal:
In this article they advocate for “creating personalized models out of population-based libraries with geometric, biological, physical, and clinical information by morphing between clinical data and medical histories from cohorts of patients using machine learning.”
From my humble point of view I think this is a enormous change in paradigma. They claim that “this perspective will shape the path toward introducing human heart simulations into precision medicine …”
This article shows:
Recent human heart modeling in:
- Electrophysiology
- Cardiac mechanics
- Fuid dynamics
Relevant applications of these models:
- Drug development
- Pacing lead failure
- Heart failure
- Ventricular assist devices
- Edge-to-edge repair
- Annuloplasty.
For each they show the motivation, simulation & discussion in a very complete and extensive way.
I am not going into the technical and the specifics of each of the techniques and models because I think it deserves much more than some lines in a post. I might write more about an specific method in a future publication.
I find this paper fascinating as it also is the technology applied into developing precision medicine. I hope I live to see precision medicine applied to every day life and available for everyone. It will be for sure a dramatically different scenario certainly for the better.
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