Progress

milestones made so far
"The risks from atrial fibrillation are embolic stroke and congestive heart failure (CHF). During atrial fibrillation, blood stagnates in the recesses of the atria, favoring clot formation. If these clots break free, they become emboli which can block the arterial blood supply to the brain (oddly not the lung - perhaps they are too small to wreak havoc in the lung). Atrial-fibrillation-associated CHF can be caused by (1) decreased cardiac output from rapid ventricular response which does not allow sufficient cardiac filling time between ventricular heartbeats and (2) loss of “atrial kick” (the normal beat of the atria) which helps to fill the ventricles between beats."

Posted by Robert Fenton Tyree, MD on July 12, 2019

Link to QIB Review Slides


List of the things I learned over the past year.

  • Scientific image processing
  • Calculus with respect to random variables
  • Parallel computing
  • Full stack web development
  • The difference between learning how to program and learning programming.

Links to Web Apps

  • FastAFSimulator2D. See Reference (2). Massively parallelized atrial fibrillation simulation on a 3D atrium mesh with free boundary conditions. Currently able to output spiral tip trajectories in small '.csv' according to RAM limitations.
  • FastAFSimulator3D. See Reference (3). Massively parallelized atrial fibrillation simulation on a 3D atrium mesh. Currently not able to output spiral tip trajectories.

References

  1. Kaboudian A., Cherry E., Fenton F., Real-time interactive simulations of large-scale systems on personal computers and cell phones: Toward patient-specific heart modeling and other applications. Sci. Adv. 2019;5:eaav6019
  2. F. H. Fenton, E. M. Cherry, H. M. Hastings, S. J. Evans, Real-time computer simulations of excitable media: JAVA as a scientific language and as a wrapper for C and FORTRAN programs. Biosystems 64, 73–96 (2002).9
  3. D. M. Lombardo, F. H. Fenton, S. M. Narayan, W.-J. Rappel, Comparison of detailed and simplified models of human atrial myocytes to recapitulate patient specific properties. PLOS Comput. Biol. 12, e1005060 (2016).

Disclaimer

Users of this simulation are cautioned that the simulation author is not providing medical, clinical, or other professional advice and to use their own professional judgement and consult any other necessary or appropriate sources prior to making clinical judgements.