SILICOFCM — EU Horizon 2020
A computational platform for in silico clinical trials of familial cardiomyopathies — ECG and CPET analysis, statistical modelling, and patient-specific 3D heart models.
- Programme
- EU Horizon 2020
- Domain
- Computational cardiology
The problem
Clinical trials for familial cardiomyopathies run into a hard limit: the trials you most want to run are frequently the ones you cannot ethically or practically run on patients. That leaves a permanent gap between what is known and what could be known — and it is a gap computation can partly close, but only if the models are faithful enough to be worth trusting with a clinical question.
The approach
SILICOFCM is an EU Horizon 2020 platform for in silico clinical trials — running trials computationally, on models, where running them on people is not an option. My contribution covered the signal and modelling side:
- ECG analysis, processing cardiac electrical signal data into features the platform could actually model against.
- CPET analysis, working with cardiopulmonary exercise testing data as a window onto cardiac function under load rather than at rest.
- Statistical modelling and biostatistics across the biomedical datasets, feeding both the platform and the peer-reviewed research built on it.
- Patient-specific 3D heart modelling, the component that makes a simulated trial specific to an individual instead of generic to a population.
The outcome
Work that fed the platform itself and the publications around it, aimed at making personalized cardiac medicine tractable — treating a patient as their own model rather than as a member of a cohort whose average they may not resemble.