GÉANT and Sim-e-Child – improving diagnosis and providing customised paediatric cardiology treatment

The Challenge

Advances in paediatric cardiac surgery, interventional cardiology, intensive care and non-invasive imaging have led to a substantial increase in life expectancy for many patients with congenital heart disease. However the study and treatment of paediatric (child) cardiology has always been hampered by the scarcity of relevant cases. This leads to a lack of integrated data between doctors and limited opportunities for clinical comparison. While relatively rare, child cardiology cases can be difficult to treat due to a scarcity of comparative data and the fact that a child’s heart and vascular systems are still developing.

The Solution

The Sim-e-Child project has combined high bandwidth research networks such as GÉANT and its NREN partners and grid computing power to create an easily accessible international paediatric cardiology database and a simulation platform to model child heart systems. This is helping to deliver improved, personalised diagnosis, treatment and research.

Key Benefits

Sim-e-Child provides cardiology professionals in Europe and the US with a complete e-infrastructure, including a decision support system that supports more informed diagnosis and a virtual laboratory for scientific simulations that extend existing models of child heart and vascular systems. 

​“In Sim-e-child we are enhancing cardiac models by utilising international collaboration beyond the European research area to validate our models on additional data. Also, the models developed in Health-e-Child are being expanded by integrating existing Siemens Corporate Research models of the aorta, aortic valve and mitral valve together with blood flow modelling and flow visualisation from the Technical University of Munich. The new and comprehensive heart model will be applied to congenital aortic heart disease and repair, thus enriching the portfolio of applications available in Health-e-Child and broadening its end-user community.” Michael Sühling, Sim-e-Child Project Coordinator, Siemens.

 

Partners in the project:​
Siemens AG Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù John Hopkins University American College of Cardiology maatG Technische Universität München Lynkeus