Biomimetic six-axis robots replicate human cardiac papillary muscle motion:
pioneering the next generation of biomechanical heart simulator technology

December 10, 2020

Our researchers from Stanford's School of Medicine, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery recently published their results in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

They utilized the power of SRCC's Sherlock HPC cluster to massively accelerate their biomechanical simulation.  From the article:

"The Sherlock cluster represents a 192-fold computational enhancement over a standard computer (2 GHz, quad-core Intel i5) allowing us to iterate over 1.4 × 1010 unique positions and orientations using 384 computing cores."

"The complex motion of papillary muscles plays an important role in mitral valve kinematics. However, current ex vivo heart simulators—crucial tools used to optimize surgical techniques and devices—do not include this motion, thus presenting a significant limitation on the translatability of the surgical optimizations. Our novel six-axis image-guided papillary muscle robotic system incorporates the complex motion of the papillary muscles and represents a significant advancement in ex vivo simulation. The system can be integrated in all future heart simulator experimentation to more accurately replicate the in vivo environment, thus enabling reliable analysis and optimization of valve repair techniques." - Annabel Imbrie-Moore

First author
Annabel M. Imbrie-Moore
Mechanical Engineering PhD Candidate
Joseph Woo Lab