Professor Solovieva - 'New Research on Dangerous Heart Disease to Fight Arrhythmias'

13:07, October 12, 2020

Prof. Olga Solovieva, alongside Dr. T. Nezlobinsky, Dr. A. V. Panfilov published a new paper on structural features of fibrosis, which is a first ever fundamental study of that issue

For the first time in the world, scientists from the Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin (UrFU) have fundamentally studied the effect of the structural features of fibrosis on the work of the heart. According to the authors, they were able to establish patterns of disturbances in the electrical excitation of cardiac tissue associated with fibrosis, which will help fight life-threatening arrhythmias. The results are published in Scientific Reports journal.

The team of scientists:

• T. Nezlobinsky, 

• O. Solovyova 

• A. V. Panfilov

Cardiac fibrosis is a pathological proliferation of connective tissue that occurs with aging, obesity and a number of heart diseases. It can be both large areas of scar tissue that occur after myocardial infarction, and randomly distributed in the myocardium point disseminations of fibrous areas. The share of fibrous tissue in the walls of the heart chambers, according to scientists from UrFU, can reach 40%.

By changing the structure of the myocardium, fibrosis creates obstacles for the propagation of a wave of electrical excitation, which causes cardiac arrhythmias. The influence of the features of the texture of fibrous tissue on the work of the myocardium has not yet been systematically studied, noted the scientists of UrFU.

"It turned out that disturbances in the excitation wave depend not only on the number of fibrous elements in the myocardial tissue, but also on their length, location in relation to muscle fibers and, most importantly, on the direction of the excitation wave," said the head of the laboratory "Mathematical modeling in physiology and medicine with the use of supercomputer technologies" - tells UrFU Professor Olga Solovieva.

This relationship has not been previously described and, according to the authors of the work, may be the key to understanding the mechanism of lethal cardiac arrhythmias. In the long term, their prevention and treatment should help the data of the study, scientists are sure.

"A comprehensive analysis of fibrosis structures in physiological experiments on animals and even more so in the clinic is practically impossible, so we used computer models, which can be used to study arbitrary fibrosis textures in order to understand the patterns of its influence on myocardial function," Olga Solovieva explained.

The computer models used, according to Ural Federal University scientists, describe well the processes of electrical excitation of individual cells and all cardiac tissue as a whole. This allowed the analysis of thousands of diverse 3D simulations of various fibrosis structures. The calculations were carried out on the supercomputer IMM UB RAS.

The research was carried out in the joint scientific laboratory "Computer Biology and Medicine" of the Ural Federal University and the Institute of Immunology and Physiology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the future, scientists plan to continue modeling more complex structures of fibrosis in order to study the most dangerous changes in the myocardium and develop methods for eliminating the arrhythmias they cause. This work was supported by a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.