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The Quest

LifeTec Group™’s PhysioHeart™ is an ex vivo beating heart platform based on slaughterhouse tissues, a cardiac simulator that has been used for many years in the preclinical research domain. The PhysioHeart™ can provide useful insights because it is living and contracting, under physiological pressures and flows.  So far, the PhysioHeart™ has mostly been used for structural interventions that were focussing on hemodynamic responses. Besides structural interventions, the platform has proven itself for imaging studies as well for most of the common clinical modalities you can think of: Ultrasound, CT, MRI,  Fluoroscopy and intracardiac videoscopy. Despite these many years of research, there is another area where a lot can be learned still: the electrophysiological behaviour of the heart, especially in the atria.

Given that the platform provides a living heart with full access to interact with the cardiac tissue and without concerns on animal welfare during the procedure, it can be an ideal tool to investigate electrophysiological devices and interventions. To determine how the ex-vivo electrophysiology of the heart compares to that of actual patients, we have made this one of our research goals. LifeTec Group™ has recently joined the SIGNET project to expand on our knowlegde on this topic.