Reconstruction of excitation patterns inside the cardiac wall from 3D ultrasound imaging

Heart rhythm disorders are one of the major causes of death globally, claiming about 16 million lives annually. Although different rhythm disorders can be classified based on the electrocardiogram, the precise temporal organisation of the electrical activity in the heart during arrhythmias remains incompletely understood. To reconstruct the precise spatiotemporal patterns in patients from non-invasive recordings is currently an unsolved challenge. A pilot study in 2018 (Christoph et al., Nature) has shown that the electrical vortices in the heart driving the rhythm disorders can be reconstructed from mathematical analysis of the mechanical deformation in ultrasound images. In this project, 3D volumetric deformation data of the cardiac wall, collected from arrhythmia patients with ultrasound technology developed by Prof. Jan D’hooge, will be used to build forward and inverse models in order to recover the spatiotemporal activation sequence of the myocardial wall, taking into account the physical laws of non-linear wave propagation in the heart. As such, the output of this project is expected to provide three-dimensional renderings of the cardiac excitation sequence with unprecedented detail.