Natalia Trayanova, PhD, the inaugural Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and her team within the Institute for Computational Medicine were recently featured in the Johns Hopkins University Rising to the Challenge Campaign for their work building complex, multi-scaled computational models that simulate electrophysiological and electromechanical heart function and test possible treatment scenarios.

From the article: “The current therapy for infarct-related fast heart rhythms is ventricular ablation in which a physician will insert a catheter in the patient’s heart to burn a piece of tissue that is believed to sustain the arrhythmia,” says Trayanova, adding that it is crucial to locate the optimal site for ablation delivery and that patients who are hemodynamically unstable have particular difficulty in tolerating this procedure which can take four to 12 hours to complete.“In my lab, using cardiac MRIs, we create patient-specific models of the heart that are able to recreate the dysfunction in each patient. Then we use these models to predict what is the best therapy for each patient,” says Trayanova, who also received the 2013 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.

The story has also been featured on the Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering websitehere.