Guide Cardiac Resynchronisation Therapy - Guide CRT

Cardiac Resynchronisation Therapy (CRT) has been shown to be a safe and effective treatment option in patients with advanced drug-refractory Heart Failure (HF), systolic dysfunction and ventricular dyssynchrony. However, up to one-third of patients implanted with a CRT device show no improvement in symptoms and up to half of patients show no improvement in cardiac function. These non-responders are a strong burden to healthcare systems by causing considerable unnecessary costs, e.g. for devices, implantations, recurring follow-up visits as well as hospitalisations for acute HF decompensation The aim of this project is to develop a single platform which integrates all stages of the CRT pipeline, referred to as the “Guide CRT”, to improve response rate. The main components of this include MR clinical imaging protocols dedicated to HF patients, tailored image processing tools (segmentation of the heart morphology, myocardial scar and coronary sinus, as well as analysis of left ventricle (LV) wall motion), fused visualisation for improved patient selection and planning of LV lead placement, and the image-based guidance technologies to support CRT device implantation. Guide CRT will be evaluated on a cohort of 50 patients. Through the proposed joint efforts between leaders in their respective industrial, academic and clinical fields, we aim to demonstrate that integrating comprehensive multimodal imaging data and tools can help to provide answers to the great challenges of CRT, namely identification of patients who are likely to respond and guiding LV lead placement to maximise this reponse.