Heart failure research within the department of Physiology focuses on the role of abnormal electrical conduction as a cause of atypical contraction and subsequent development of heart failure. In addition, the potential to prevent or treat heart failure by improved cardiac electrical activation is investigated.
The use of all approaches mentioned above for improving cardiac resynchronization is illustrated by figure 5
Figure 1. The Flexcell system can cyclically stretch isolated cells for several days.
Figure 2: To create a 3D ring of engineered heart matrix, cardiac fibroblasts are cultured in a collagen hydrogel in a silicone mold (upper left), resulting in a ring structure (upper right) that can be stretched subsequently (lower).
Figure 3. example of matching of animal experiments with the Circadapt computer program. Electrical activation, measured by electrodes on the epicardium (signals upper left) and pump function (upper right) were measured in animal experiments. Electrical activation data were used as input for computer simulations that proved to replicate pump function (validation). Following validation, additional information on heart and circulation were predicted by the model.
Figure 4. Example of clinical study. Animal experiments had shown good performance of left ventricular (LV) septal pacing in case of conduction abnormalities. LV septaum pacing was compared with conventional biventricular pacing in patients using body surface mapping and LV pressure measurements. LV septum pacing performed at least as good as biventricular pacing, while it requires one electrode less to be implanted.
Figure 5. integral few how the various experimental approaches can be combined