Abstract: PURPOSE:
Personalized computational simulations of the heart could open up new improved approaches to diagnosis and surgery assistance systems. While it is fully recognized that myocardial fiber orientation is central for the construction of realistic computational models of cardiac electromechanics, the role of its overall architecture and connectivity remains unclear. Morphological studies show that the distribution of cardiac muscular fibers at the basal ring connects epicardium and endocardium. However, computational models simplify their distribution and disregard the basal loop. This work explores the influence in computational simulations of fiber distribution at different short-axis cuts.
METHODS:
We have used a highly parallelized computational solver to test different fiber models of ventricular muscular connectivity. We have considered two rule-based mathematical models and an own-designed method preserving basal connectivity as observed in experimental data. Simulated cardiac functional scores (rotation, torsion and longitudinal shortening) were compared to experimental healthy ranges using generalized models (rotation) and Mahalanobis distances (shortening, torsion).
RESULTS:
The probability of rotation was significantly lower for ruled-based models [95% CI (0.13, 0.20)] in comparison with experimental data [95% CI (0.23, 0.31)]. The Mahalanobis distance for experimental data was in the edge of the region enclosing 99% of the healthy population.
CONCLUSIONS:
Cardiac electromechanical simulations of the heart with fibers extracted from experimental data produce functional scores closer to healthy ranges than rule-based models disregarding architecture connectivity.

Abstract: According to the World Health Organization, epilepsy affects more than 50 million people in the world, and specifically, 80% of them live in developing countries. Therefore, epilepsy has become among the major public issue for many governments and deserves to be engaged. Epilepsy is characterized by uncontrollable seizures in the subject due to a sudden abnormal functionality of the brain. Recurrence of epilepsy attacks change people’s lives and interferes with their daily activities. Although epilepsy has no cure, it could be mitigated with an appropriated diagnosis and medication. Usually, epilepsy diagnosis is based on the analysis of an electroencephalogram (EEG) of the patient. However, the process of searching for seizure patterns in a multichannel EEG recording is a visual demanding and time consuming task, even for experienced neurologists. Despite the recent progress in automatic recognition of epilepsy, the multichannel nature of EEG recordings still challenges current methods. In this work, a new method to detect epilepsy in multichannel EEG recordings is proposed. First, the method uses convolutions to perform channel fusion, and next, a self-attention network extracts temporal features to classify between interictal and ictal epilepsy states. The method was validated in the public CHB-MIT dataset using the k-fold cross-validation and achieved 99.74% of specificity and 99.15% of sensitivity, surpassing current approaches.