Biomedical Engineers Helps Heart Surgeons with Virtual Surgery Tool

May 1, 2010
Biomedical engineers designed software that allows heart surgeons to perform a virtual surgery before entering the operating room. The tool allows the surgeon to see the predicted outcomes of different surgical approaches, & help determine which would be the best for the patient. The tool uses MRI images of the heart at different times in the cardiac cycle to model the cardiovascular anatomy, blood flow & heart rate. Based on what this 3D model reveals, surgeons can see what needs to be corrected & attempt multiple different procedures using the tool. An analysis of the heart's fluid dynamics describes how well blood flows after the virtual procedure.

Every year, 36,000 U.S. children are born with heart defects, or abnormalities that keep their hearts from functioning properly, putting their lives at risk.
Fixing these problems can mean complex, repeated surgeries & every case is unique. Now, a virtual tool is giving surgeons a new way to predict & improve the outcome for these tiny patients, before they ever get to the Operating Room.

Georgia Chapman is only two, yet she's already had two major operations to repair congenital defects in her heart. "Didn't know nothing was really wrong with her until I took her in for a diaper rash," Ashley Chapman, Georgiaýs mother, told Ivanhoe. "They thought they heard a heart murmur & they sent me to a specialist."
A successful surgery gave Georgia a second chance at life.

In complex pediatric heart surgeries, precision is key. That's where Georgia Tech biomedical engineers come in. With an MRI image of the patient's heart, researchers apply the science of fluid dynamics, or how things flow, to first identify the patent's specific problem. The system shows how different surgical approaches change the patient's blood flow so the surgeon can see which approach would work best.
"I think the beauty of it is it really allows them to look at various options without going into the operating room & figuring out what they're going to do or preplanning the day before," Ajit Yoganathan, Ph.D., a biomedical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga., explained.

The goal is better outcomes for patients like a child born with only one working ventricle.
"After the operation we would hope that the child would have the best possible operation for him or her, so that they could have a lifetime of normal heart function," Kirk Kanter, M.D., chief of pediatric heart surgery at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., said.

It's science that could make a big difference for little hearts.

Though the virtual surgery tool is still experimental, researchers believe the simulations could be eventually adapted to allow pre-planning for a variety of pediatric heart surgeries, potentially improving outcomes for those with serious heart problems.

Science Insider
HAVE A HEART: The heart pumps 5.6 liters of blood through the entire body in roughly 20 seconds; each day your blood travels some 12,000 miles, & your heart beats about 100,000 times. This delivers oxygen & other essential nutrients to the body's cells & organs. A heart attack occurs when the blood supply to the heart muscle is cut off, either because part of the heart is damaged (such as the valves to the chambers), or because plaque has built up inside the arteries, narrowing them & severely restricting blood flow. Symptoms of a heart attack include a squeezing discomfort in the center of the chest, pain or tingling in the left arm, shortness of breath & sometimes a cold sweat, nausea, or dizziness.

ABOUT FLUID DYNAMICS: The study of the physics of fluids -- matter in liquid, plastic, gaseous, & plasma states -- is called fluid dynamics. Understanding the behavior of matter under different temperature & pressure conditions is important to applications such as the aerodynamics of aircraft & automobiles, the flow of petroleum through pipelines, weather prediction, & even traffic engineering. Other concepts important to solving problems in this discipline include the velocity & density of a fluid.

Posted in: Health