Biomaterials and Broken Hearts
By: Avantika Samanta
It is widely known that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Millions suffer from cardiovascular disease, and there are a great variety of different treatments that are currently in use. The damage that is created by heart disease is irreversible so there is an urgent need for the development of advanced technologies which can potentially provide some new and effective solutions. Aside from surgeries such as transplants or other various forms of treating damaged ventricular walls and valves, many biomaterials are being used by medical professionals for the repair and replacement of heart tissues. Biomaterials are a possible way to improve the problem the United States and the rest of the world is facing when it comes to the widespread risks of heart disease.
In order to understand the influence of biomaterials on the heart, it must be understood what biomaterials are . There are many potential definitions for biomaterials, but one broad one is that a biomaterial is any substance aside from a drug, or a combination of substances that can be of natural origin or human-made, that are able to be used for any amount of time as the entire system or part of the system, replacing either an organ, tissue, or function of the human body. Synthetic and natural biomaterials are the main two categories of biomaterials. Natural biomaterials are obtained from xenogenic (animal), allogenic (same species), or autogenic (same individual) sources; nonhuman tissue usually being from animals such as cows or pigs. Synthetic, or human-made biomaterials, are derived from the classically defined materials which include metals, polymers, and ceramics. Medically speaking, the preference of a biomaterial has usually been for inert animals because it minimizes the reaction when the differing biological tissues happen to interact.
For heart disease, there are limited options for treatment. Most procedures are just temporary solutions until the heart gets worse and a transplant is available. But biomaterials provide a solution without needing a future transplant. However, when cardiovascular biomaterials (CB) are going to be used, many factors must be considered. For starters, the CB must be subjected to its blood compatibility and be able to interact with its surrounding environment effectively – wherever the material may be implanted. Biocompatibility refers to the tissue and material interactions that must be considered. The cardiovascular system is made up of the heart and numerous blood vessels. It is a complex system and many factors impact the potential success of a biomaterial being used. The aim is to create biomaterials that can repair damaged heart muscle and heart tissue. But, biomaterials may face rejection upon entering the body, so immunosuppressants would be used. This may weaken the patient. There are therapies which use stem cells to create biomaterials that don’t come with a fear of rejection, but patients struggling with some form of heart disease don’t have the time to wait for a biomaterial to be created using stem cells.
Using biomaterials for healing the heart is being studied around the world. It is a large innovation in the field of medicine, and although there may be issues that are left to figure out, this technology is the future. This powerful advance in medicine may pave the way for even more discoveries and the world may finally be able to truly fix a broken heart.
Artificial Intelligence and Cardiac Amyloidosis
By: MariaJose Flores
“One person dies every 36 seconds in the United States from Cardiovascular disease” (Centers for Disease, Control and Prevention). Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States although heart problems branch out in many specific areas such as cardiac amyloidosis. Cardiac Amyloidosis emerges due to misfolded proteins in the heart muscle. As a result, cardiomyopathy arises and allows for heart failure, conduction system disease, and ultimately heart death. The disease seems to be underdiagnosed but as time progresses, detection of the disease has increased as a result of different therapies offered.
Artificial intelligence is still quite new to the medical department. Primary care physicians use AI’s to analyze and present data according to the patient’s needs. “In the fall of 2018, researchers at Seoul National University Hospital and College of Medicine developed an AI algorithm called DLAD (Deep Learning-based Automatic Detection) to analyze chest radiographs and detect abnormal cell growth, such as potential cancers” (Since in the News). Recently, AI has been used in the detection of Cardiac Amyloidosis through the help of electrocardiography and echocardiography. Humans have two main issues when it comes to the reading of an echocardiogram on this disease. One reason is that there’s a big lack of specific features in the videos and secondly, most experts fail to point out specific features in all of the videos. In one particular study, a test was performed with expert readers and an AUC model. The AUC model helps visualize the precision of having a positive detection or a false positive, which is modeled as the area under the curve of a graph. The model ended up outperforming the expert readers which revealed that 95% of the result was confidence interval.
Electrocardiogram and echocardiogram models could be the next step to the diagnosis of Cardiac Amyloidosis. There are several benefits to these models but there is still a long way to go. There are many potential true and false positives. The AI model is to be focused on major model performance. There are still many limitations to the study of AI’s with these diseases due to them being underdiagnosed. Nonetheless, as new rare diseases are detected, specific models are developed which increases the number of therapies. In turn, it allows for new information to arise and provide an understanding of the subject thus allowing a similar development of archetypes for underdiagnosed circumstances.
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Biomaterials and Broken Hearts
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Artificial Intelligence and Cardiac Amyloidosis
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