Large Scale Cardiovascular Model Personalisation for Mechanistic Analysis of Heart and Brain Interactions

Abstract

Cerebrovascular diseases have been associated with a variety of heart diseases like heart failure or atrial fibrillation, however the mechanistic relationship between these pathologies is largely unknown. Until now, the study of the underlying heart-brain link has been challenging due to the lack of databases containing data from both organs. Current large data collection initiatives such as the UK Biobank provide us with joint cardiac and brain imaging information for thousands of individuals, and represent a unique opportunity to gain insights about the heart and brain pathophysiology from a systems medicine point of view. Research has focused on standard statistical studies finding correlations in a phenomenological way. We propose a mechanistic analysis of the heart and brain interactions through the personalisation of the parameters of a lumped cardiovascular model under constraints provided by brain-volumetric parameters extracted from imaging, i.e: ventricles or white matter hyperintensities volumes, and clinical information such as age or body surface area. We applied this framework in a cohort of more than 3000 subjects and in a pathological subgroup of 53 subjects diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. Our results show that the use of brain feature constraints helps in improving the parameter estimation in order to identify significant differences associated to specific clinical conditions.