Philips to lead ‘euHeart’ project

Royal Philips Electronics is to lead a pan-European project to develop advanced computer modelling to enable highly personalised diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

The project, called euHeart, will bring together the latest advances in modelling and computing to improve the care of patients with heart disease.

Philips will lead a consortium of prestigious European medical and academic research teams, from hospitals and universities in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, UK, France and Belgium. The four year project, involving 16 institutions, will receive €14m in EU funding.

EuHeart will research targeting the diagnosis and treatment phases of the cardiovascular conditions. Conditions to be covered include heart failure, coronary artery disease, heart rhythm disorders, and congenital heart defects.

The euHeart consortium aims to develop advanced computer models of the human heart that can be personalised to patient-specific conditions using a variety of clinical data. Sources of data to be used include CT Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, measurements of blood flow and blood pressure in the coronary arteries and ECGs (Electrocardiograms).

The computer models developed 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 functioning of the heart at these levels.

Such sophisticated and personalised computer modelling should make it possible to develop simulation tools that doctors can use to predict the outcome of different types of therapy. This should be a key step towards the development of therapies far more personalised to individual patients.

Professor Reza Razavi, the Project’s Clinical Coordinator who is also Professor of Paediatric Cardiovascular Science and Head of the Division of Imaging Sciences at King’s College, London, said of euHeart “It may ultimately allow us to select and optimise the best treatment for individual patients.”

The project is being funded as part of the EU’s FP7 framework, and forms part of the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) initiative – a collaborative effort that aims to produce a computer model of the entire human body so that it can be investigated as a single complex system.

Within the multidisciplinary euHeart consortium, the University of Oxford is the scientific coordinator of the project, while King’s College will lead the clinical program.

The full membership of the euHeart Consortium is: Academic Medical Center Amsterdam (Netherlands) : Berlin Heart (Germany) : Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (Germany) : HemoLab (Netherlands) : Hospital Clínico San Carlos de Madrid Insalud (Spain) : Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (France) : Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (France): King’s College London (United Kingdom) : Philips Healthcare (Netherlands, Spain) : Philips Research (Germany) : PolyDimensions (Germany) : Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) : University of Karlsruhe (Germany) : University of Oxford (United Kingdom) : University of Sheffield (United Kingdom) : Volcano Europe SA/NV (Belgium).

Further details on the euHeart project can be found at www.research.philips.com/newscenter/backgrounders/080820-euheart.html