Clinical Assist System for Cardiac Ablation

Cardiac Ablation is an effective treatment of arrhythmia in which physicians terminate fast heart rate by transecting abnormal electrical conduction pathways in the heart with RF energy. During the procedure, physicians have to visualize and continuously update suspected heart conditions in their mind, causing heavy mental burden on the physicians. In this project, cardiac electrophysiology is formalized using a physiological model of the heart, such that the diagnosis problem during cardiac ablation can be formalized as parameter identification and state estimation problems with the heart model. A model-based clinical assist system is proposed which enumerates suspected heart conditions by creating “digital twins” of the patient’s heart with heart models. The system provides more rigorous and intuitive interpretation of current understanding of the patient’s heart, and improves the accuracy and efficiency of cardiac ablation procedures by relieving the physicians from demanding low-level reasoning.