Project Digital Heart (LCN)

Would you like to know how your heart will beat in 20 years ? Digital Heart (LCN) proposes a multi-scale, cross-disciplinary and multi-modalities approach to better understand pathophysiology, optimize the response to physical exercise, and plan therapy.

About the Project

Cardiovascular diseases are currently the leading cause of death in the world. Research in terms of understanding and prevention of these pathologies is a real societal challenge. UCA has a network of theoretical and applied skills in the fields of treatment and modeling of cardiac signals (I3S, Inria), cardiology (CHU), physiology (STARS lab) and biology (IPMC), as well as companies specialized in the domain (GE Healthcare, ExactCure). An integrative and transdisciplinary approach to issues related to the normal and pathological functioning of the heart would allow us to remove some of the current scientific locks from the pooling of this competence network within UCA. Today the study of cardiac function is limited by two major constraints, namely multi-physical interactions that modulate heart function and the inherent variability  in acute and chronic physiological adaptations. The proposed methodology to respond to these constraints is to integrate the skills of the partners through a multi-modal and multi-scale approach. This approach will be based on three selected clinical applications: pulmonary hypertension, atrial fibrillation, and pharmacological treatments. The research will be carried out through internships co-supervised by a number of partners. This will allow to better understand the different areas involved and to obtain preliminary data giving the possibility to design larger projects.