EuHeartDB: A web-enabled database for geometrical models of the heart

Abstract

Achieving patient specific treatments is of fundamental importance in the future provision of cost and patient effective health care services for cardiovascular diseases. Implementing this view requires that software and data are reused and shared over the investigation process and within each single process phase. Within the heart modeling and simulation phase, geometrical models can be reused and shared with interoperable markup languages and a central repository. A markup language has been recently proposed to describe such models whereas a repository is still needed. In this paper we introduce euHeartDB, a publicly accessible database that aims to satisfy this role by providing the functionalities to upload, to search and to integrate geometrical models. The database is web-enabled and allows the visualization of the models which functionality is fundamental to human users. In addition, euHeartDB uses the Foundational Model of Anatomy ontology to classify the models and to support semantic-based queries. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.