Simulation of the cardiovascular system

The CARDIOLAB system

CARDIOLAB incorporates a virtual cardiovascular system on which a doctor or a student can act by performing virtual experiments.

CARDIOLAB ’s environment allows the user to :

• interactively modify basic physiological parameters in order to understand heart electrical activity and hemodynamics.
• trigger and stop arrhythmias based on scenarios reproducing real situations.
• enrich the system by adding new physiopathological cases .  

CARDIOLAB incorporates a 3D simulator of cardiac electrical activity. The main role of the simulator is to reproduce cardiac arrhythmias from electrophysiological data entered interactively by the user. Also, an hemodynamic model describing the pulmonary and systemic networks, is coupled to the electrical model, allowing to assess the hemodynamic consequences of cardiac electrical and mechanical activity.

Electrocardiographic (EEG) and magnetocardiographic (MCG) signals can also be computed by the model. Therefore, the simulator can help correlate the spatio-temporal patterns of heart electrical processes with the corresponding signals observed on the body surface. This possibility opens real prospects for a non-invasive diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias.

Illustrations