Dr. Solomon R. Eisenberg

The panel also included Dr. Carla Romney, Chair of the Science & Engineering Dept. at B.U.; Dr. Nitzan Resnick, Co-Director of SASSDS' New Science and Math Initiative; Dr. Sol Eisenberg, bioengineering professor of B.U; and Yishai Zohar, founder of Puretech Ventures.

"The value is the real-time capability," said BU professor of biomedical engineering Solomon Eisenberg, who is working with doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital (Harvard Medical School's teaching hospital) on the 3-D visualization of patients' internal anatomies and implant devices.

"That's the holy grail piece: to have computational aspect happen fast enough to inform what you're doing next, when you are in the middle of doing a lot of things," he added.
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"You don't want to fry the heart," said Solomon Eisenberg, professor of biomedical engineering at BU.The only way to get the setting right is by trial and error, said Eisenberg, "to fibrillate and defibrillate."

Real-time 3-D visualizations running on the BU supercomputer could simulate the electrical fields inside a patient, which are created by the defibrillator's electrodes, Eisenberg believes.

The anatomy of each cardiac patient is unique: the position and shape of the heart, and the thickness of ventrical walls, for example, all help determine how a defibrillator shock will affect the heart.

"These are things that are not understood by looking at a person on the outside," said Eisenberg.

Authors of the American Journal of Physiology paper are Nenad Bursac, a Boston University (BU) graduate student and HST visiting scholar; Maria Papadaki, an HST postdoctoral associate; Richard J. Cohen, Whitaker Professor of Biomedical Engineering at HST; Frederick J. Schoen, associate director of HST, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital; Professor Solomon R. Eisenberg, associate dean of engineering at BU; Rebecca L. Carrier, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering (CE); Dr. Vunjak-Novakovic and Dr. Freed.