Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Integrated Computational-Experimental Cardiac Modeling: Application to Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension

Reza Avaz, Research scientist, Computational cardiac modeling, Willerson Center for Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation, Oden Institute for CS&E at UT Austin.

Abstract

The development of integrated computational-experimental models of normal and impaired hearts offers novel ways to better understand the pathophysiology of heart remodeling in response to structural heart diseases and to design and personalize cardiac interventions. Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive structural heart disease that imposes a chronic pressure overload in the right ventricle (RV), leading to substantial remodeling events including hypertrophy of muscle cells and dilation of the RV. Many studies, including ours, suggest that the fate of a patient with PAH is not determined by the degree of pressure overload but rather by how the RV responds to it. However, the question of how to predict whether the RV remodeling in response to PAH stabilizes or rapidly transitions to RV failure remains largely unanswered. In this talk, I will present our work on developing rat-specific computational heart models to study time-course cardiac remodeling in response to PAH. I will discuss novel insights, from our model, delineating how the remodeling events at multiple scales in the myocardium (including cellular, fiber, and tissue levels) collectively lead to the cardiac function impairment in the RV. In particular, I aim to demonstrate the capability of our model to identify predictive biomarkers for early diagnosis of PAH, and to guide subsequent patient-specific pharmaceutical and medical device interventions. Along these lines, I will conclude my talk by discussing how our integrated modeling platform offers an effective approach for the optimal design of ventricular assist devices, and serves as an important step towards identifying and evaluating therapeutic targets for drug development to treat PAH. Bio Dr. Reza Avaz is a research scientist in the area of computational cardiac modeling in the Willerson Center for Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Avaz earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania (2014) in the area of constitutive modeling of soft materials. Dr. Avaz’s research interests are focused on developing and using multiphysics integrated computational-experimental models of the heart under normal, pathological and therapeutic conditions for the design and optimization of regenerative therapies to treat structural heart diseases.