Computational Modeling of Cardiac Devices Implanted in Specimens Preserved within the Visible Heart® Laboratories’ Human Heart Library

Abstract

The Visible Heart® Laboratories’ (VHL) Atlas of Cardiac Anatomy is an open public resource to students, medical professionals, and individuals in medical device companies that contains expansive cardiac anatomy and physiology information. Within this website is the human heart library, which contains 835 specimens overall, including perfusion-fixed and pre-fixed specimens collected from the Advanced Cardiac Anatomy and Physiology Course, as well as donated hearts received from LifeSource. The physical specimens are housed within the VHL (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and individuals that utilize the library can take pictures, make measurements, and perform device draping studies as long as these procedures are non-destructive. In this project, the main aim was to identify heart specimens within the VHL human heart library and build a database of the hearts that had associated implanted cardiac devices within. With the successful imaging of a large number of hearts with a variety of cardiac devices, these images will be made available on the free-access Atlas of Human Cardiac Device website: this will include photos and unity flythrough movies, as well as the resultant generated computational models.