System and Method for Personalized Arrhythmia Risk Assessment by Simulating Arrhythmia Inducibility

Unmet Need
Each year over 300,000 people die of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in the US alone. Implanted cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) are considered the best defense against SCD. However, the processes for determining good candidates for ICDs remains vague and overly inclusive. Current tests that provide better pictures of a patient’s SCD risk are invasive and expensive. Consequently, tens of thousands of individuals receive unnecessary, invasive surgery each year to have unneeded, expensive foreign objects implanted in their hearts that also have the potential to cause physical harm and death in rare cases.
 
Technology Overview
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have developed new advanced models capable of determining a patient’s risk of SCD in silico using cardiac models. Personalized Arrhythmia Risk Assessment Systems would be personalized, highly detailed digital models of patients’ hearts. These models would allow doctors to run in depth electrophysiological studies (EPS), while remaining completely non-invasive, and posing zero risk to the patient. Additionally, these models would provide a substantially cheaper alternative to surgical EPS, dramatically reducing the number of ICD implants each year, limiting harm and cost to patients, and reducing the number of deaths each year related to unnecessary medical implants.
 
Stage of Development
Early human study completed.

Publications
HJ Arevalo, et al. Arrhythmia risk stratification of patients after myocardial infarction using personalized heart models. Nature Communications. 7, Art. No. 11437 (2016).

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