Heart phantom with electrical properties of heart muscle tissue

Abstract

The weakened heart is supported by a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to supply the heart muscle with oxygenated blood. In case the heart muscle recovers during LVAD therapy, the patient has to be weaned from the device. To date, there is no adequate method to detect heart muscle recovery in LVAD therapy. In order to establish a novel method based on the measurement of electric conductivity, this study presents a silicone model of a ventricle mock-up to simulate the electrical properties of cardiac muscle tissue. Previously, it has been shown that the electrical properties of myocardial tissue change during ischemia, so that these changes are a possible estimate for measuring the condition of myocardial tissue. To this purpose, this study presents a casting process for a ventricle model and describes the materials used to imitate the electrical properties of the heart muscle to obtain conductive material. Initial results showed that the higher the carbon concentration in the silicone, the higher the conductivity of the silicone samples. The measurements were performed at different frequencies and the samples were analyzed for homogenization.

Keywords

• silicone conductivity
• lvad
• electrical properties myocardium