The four-year programme - which involves public and private partners from 16 research, academic, industrial and medical organizations across six European countries - has a budget of approximately €19 million (of which approximately €14 million will be provided by the EU's 7th Framework research programme).
By targeting the diagnosis and treatment phases of conditions such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, heart-rhythm disorders and congenital heart defects, euHeart complements the recently announced HeartCycle project, also led by Philips, which focuses on long-term management of chronic-heart-disease patients.
In terms of specifics, the euHeart partners are aiming to develop computer models of the human heart that can be personalized to patient-specific conditions using clinical data from various sources - for example, CT and MRI scans, measurements of blood flow and blood pressure in the coronary arteries, and electrocardiograms.
These models, says Philips, will integrate the behaviour of the heart and the aorta at molecular, cellular, tissue and organ-level. They will also incorporate clinical knowledge about how cardiovascular disease disturbs the correct functioning of the heart at these levels. If euHeart can make that vision a reality, it may point the way to simulation tools that doctors can use to predict the outcome of different types of personalized therapy.
As an example, one way of treating heart-rhythm disorders is a minimally invasive procedure known as RF ablation. During this procedure, a catheter is inserted into the patient’s heart and the tissue responsible for propagating abnormal electrical signals through the heart muscle is destroyed using heat from an RF field generated at the tip of the catheter.
Right now, doctors have to rely on their experience to decide which areas of tissue to destroy – a task that's complicated by the fact that the electrical activity in every patient's heart is subtly different. The hope is that computer models that reflect the patient's unique heart structure and function may enable doctors to test the results of destroying different areas of tissue before operating on the patient.
None of which is likely to be easy, noted Henk van Houten, senior vice-president of Philips Research: "The development of computer models that integrate structural and functional information of the heart and then personalize it to individual patients is a mammoth task that will require the multidisciplinary effort of researchers with strong know-how in biophysical modelling and image processing, clinical experts, and engineers in the device and imaging industries. In the euHeart project, we are confident that we have brought together the necessary expertise."
The University of Oxford (Oxford, UK) is the scientific coordinator of the project, while King's College London (London, UK) leads the clinical programme.