Categories for this invention

Software

Modelling

Medical Devices

Intellectual Property

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EMULATING HYBRID SYSTEMS

PCT

WO/2017/037659
 

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Contact: Maria Jose Alvarez

Summary

An emulated heart built from sophisticated software and Field-Programmable Gate Array devices, which mimics human heart behaviour at the cell level, including disease states, with unprecedented accuracy, in real time.

Problems Addressed

Rapid modelling, or modelling behaviour in real time – within the same timescale that the actual behaviour of interest happens – is a challenging problem, and becomes more difficult as the complexity of the systems of interest increases. Live organ emulations are invasive, time consuming, expensive, and impractical for long-term testing and validation of pacemaker performances, education and training of clinicians and personalized medicine – leaving aside the substantial ethical issues associated with such testing.

Applications

Suitable for use in the testing, validation and setting of implantable pacemakers & ICDs, education training and personalized medicine. The model generates electrical signals like those produced by a living heart. The electrical signal represents electrogram measurements on the heart surface, and the heart model generates them in real time using a programmable computer chip. The technology can model the heart as thousands of regions for greater accuracy, helping to understand its functions, disease state and the effect of medications, helping also to improve live testing of pacing devices without using live organs.

Technology

A real time emulation of a human heart, running on a programmed semiconductor device. The model generates electrical signals like those produced by a living heart. The electrical signal represents electrogram measurements on the heart surface, and the heart model generates them in real time using a programmable computer chip. The technology can model the heart as thousands of regions for greater accuracy, helping to understand its functions, disease state and the effect of medications, helping also to improve live testing of pacing devices without using live organs.

Advantages

• Mimics human heart behaviour at the cell level, including disease states, with unprecedented accuracy, in real time
• Allows to automatically derive parallel implementations of a large number (many thousands) of heart regions on a FPGA device
• Enables emulation of the organ – not simulation of it. This allows for the testing to be the same or nearly as identical as connecting a pacemaker to a live heart for validation
• Reduced testing cost and time

PROJECT#34582

Inventors

Associate Professor Partha Roop

Embedded Systems Group

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr Avinash Malik

Embedded Systems Group

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering