Supervising student projects

Today, I will tell you a bit about supervising students being a PhD candidate. Here at KIT, research assistants have the opportunity to help supervising projects for bachelor or master’s thesis. I will talk the beginning of this experience for me.

Work with openCARP ...

 In the last post I talked about my last work using MATLAB. Comping all the numerical solvers I decided which will be incorporated in my model. Before I implement my model in openCAPP, I have to study the source code. However, this code is very complicated because has a lot of files, libraries, and classes that interact with each other. Every day, I learn a bit more about the software and understand how everything works a bit better. Nonetheless, I will still need more time to put my model into the openCARP framework.

Student Project

Given that the MATLAB code for the Eikonal model is working well, I decided to open a position for a bachelor thesis to produce some results using this code. The idea of this project is based on the paper published in 2018 by Simone Rossi, Stephen Gaeta et al. named “Muscle Thickness and Curvature Influence Atrial Conduction Velocities” Here they vary the curvature, wall thickness, and bath-loading of the tissue. Then they calculate through computer simulations the conduction velocity in the endocardium in each one of the settings. In the image you can see some of their results:

Taken from Rossi et al. 2018. Extracellular potential on selected curvatures for muscle thickness = 1.5 mm (right to the black line) and blood-bath thickness =6 mm ( left to the black line) at time t=15 ms (Initial stimulus at time t= 0 ms starts in the bottom of the tissue). The curvature of the domain changes the endocardial conduction velocity as well as the shape of the wavefront. The wavefront is located at the sharp transition between negative (blue) and positive (red) voltages.

My idea is to take the results in Rossi’s paper to create a regression model, where we use the geometry of the tissue  to calculate the conduction velocity.  The results of the regression model can be used in the Eikonal model to simulate the wave front propagation. Finally, the geometrical changes will shape the wave front with the curvature that is typically observed in biophysical models. 

I am still looking for candidates so if you are 

– Master or bachelor student in biomedical, electrical engineering, mathematics or similar

– You are interested in cardiac modelling but you have little or none experience.

– You are very curious and eager to learn

Then, this project might be for you because it is the perfect opportunity to understand the basics of cardiac modelling through a relatively simple task. Therefore, it could be the door that allows you to undertake more challenging projects in the field of cardiac modelling in the future. This is the  link of the project, check it out and if you are interested send me a email.

Training in Maastricht

In the following weeks, the personalizeAF training in Maastricht will take place. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus, they will be online but still, it is a nice opportunity to meet the rest of the team in the consortium.  I will tell you how it goes in the next post.

See you soon!

Cristian