Biophysical Cardiac Ablation Simulator

Be a scientist using your phone. Cure cardiac arrhythmias with your fingertips!

Biophysical Cardiac Ablation Simulator app shows you a biophysical simulation of how the electrical signal can propagate in the heart in diseases called arrhythmias. In arrhythmias, the electrical signal does not move orderly from one region to another, as in a healthy heart, but instead forms loops (like a short-circuit). This prevents the heart from beating effectively and can, in some circumstances, leads to death.

In this app, you will mimic a procedure to treat arrhythmias called catheter ablation, where doctors selectively burn small areas of the heart to terminate the short-circuits causing the arrhythmias.

In this app, you can choose what areas of a flattened 2D heart to burn, by touching the screen. Your goal is to terminate the arrhythmias by eliminating all the red patches with as few clicks as possible. Right now, it is not clear what the best strategy to eliminate these short-circuits is, so you will be addressing an open clinical research question in this app!

The Biophysical Cardiac Ablation Simulator app was developed by researchers in the Biomedical Engineering Department at King's College London, UK, with generous funding from the Institute of Physics.