Graeme Clark Oration presentation
The 2020 Graeme Clark Schools Oration
Presented by Dr Natalia Trayanova
When: 20th July, 2020
Where: Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
Time: 3.30pm - 4.30pm
Click here to find out more about the Graeme Clark Oration schools program
Your Heart's Digital Twin
Can you imagine having a virtual twin of yourself? Seems like something out of a science-fiction movie, but Dr Natalia Trayanova has made it possible to have a personalised, digital twin of your heart.
Trial-and-error is currently used to make decisions for patients with life-threatening diseases, making repeat procedures commonplace. But we can do better. Natalia wants to bring computer simulations into the clinic to make more precise decisions around treatment. We use computer simulations to build airplanes and rockets, and design self-driving cars, but have rarely used them in medicine.
Using information from a patient’s heart scans and their clinical data, Natalia builds a computer model of their heart to mimic its activity. She then applies the digital twin technology to diagnose patients with heart disease and predict adverse cardiac events, such as sudden death or an irregular heart rhythm. It is also possible to develop precise treatments and test them on these digital hearts that exactly mimic the biology and physics of electrical activity in a patient’s heart.
Natalia’s current focus in on treating irregular heartbeats (arrhythmia), which is often only caused by a small section of heart tissue. To treat it, cardiologists will destroy that tissue to help restore the heart’s regular rhythm using radiofrequency energy (similar to a microwave). But what if they zap the wrong spot?
You can easily poke and prod a virtual heart in a way that you can’t with a flesh-and-blood human heart. This computational approach eliminates the process of trial-and-error in treating heart rhythm disorders and thus the need for repeat procedures because it wasn’t done right the first time. Effectively like Google Maps of the heart, where we can zoom in to see what is happening at the molecular, cellular and tissue levels, this is an incredibly powerful tool.
Click here to read more about Dr Trayanova at the Graeme Clark Oration website.