Faculty Candidate
My Research Journey—Ventricular Arrhythmia Localization
Shijie Zhou, PhD
Assistant Professor in Chemical, Paper, and Biomedical Engineering
Miami University
Monday, May 20, 2024
Gateway 1002
12:00pm – 12:50pm
Abstract: Sudden cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death in developed countries, accounting for approximately 350,000 deaths per year in the United States. The majority of these events are caused by ventricular arrhythmias (VA). Implantable defibrillators reduce mortality in high-risk patients, but do not prevent recurrent arrhythmias. Suppression of recurrent ventricular tachycardia (VT) can be effectively accomplished with catheter ablation (CA); more recently cardiac stereotactic body radiotherapy (cSBRT) has been shown to potentially play a role. Accurate identification of the substrate responsible for the VA is key to the success of either of these modalities. Currently, there is a lack of technology-driven mapping approaches that can non-invasively and accurately target the VT substrate location based on identified VT exit sites and circuits. There is an urgent need for innovative methodologies to guide non-invasive VT treatments accurately. To bridge this gap, we present a novel ECG-image-based mapping technique. By leveraging a data-driven model combined with a patient-specific heart digital twin, we non-invasively and accurately target the VT substrate location based on identified (1) substrate-based VT circuits (e.g. conducting channel locations) and (2) predicted VT exit sites. Furthermore, the personalized heart digital twin is applied to cardiac CT imaging and used to predict VT circuits associated with individual VT morphologies. The data-driven model is used to localize VT exit sites onto the patient-specific CT surface mesh using clinically-induced/recorded VT ECGs. Subsequently, the proposed approach establishes a spatially concordant relationship based on the predicted VT circuits and exit sites, providing complementary information to accurately target VT substrate locations.
Biography: Shijie Zhou received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Dalhousie University (2018) under the guidance of Dr. B. Milan Horáček, where he was trained in an Integrated NSERC CREATE program in Biomedical Device Innovation. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the localization of ventricular activation origin using patient-specific geometry based on 12-lead ECG or 120-lead body-surface potential mapping. Dr. Zhou’s research has been selected for multiple awards, including Cardiac Electrophysiology Society Young Investigator Awards (YIA) Finalist (2017, 2021), HRS YIA Finalist (2018), CANet Travel Grant (2018, 2019), HRS Travel Grant (2019), and Finalist for the Third Annual Mark Josephson Competition in VT Symposium 2019. His present and future research focuses on developing a new generation of electrophysiological imaging techniques based on personalized 3D cardiac computational models.
For a zoom link please contact June Norton at jnorton@wpi.edu or Kate Harrison at kharrison@wpi.edu