New paper on real-time cardiac arrhythmia simulation published in Nature Communications

Simone Pezzuto, 29th July 2026

Our paper, “A physics-informed eikonal model for simulating arrhythmias in the human heart in real-time,” has been published in Nature Communications.

The study is the result of a collaboration between Thomas Schrotter, Matthias Gsell, Elena Zappon, Christoph Augustin, Aurel Neic, Simone Pezzuto and Gernot Plank.

Personalised computational models of cardiac electrophysiology (often referred to as cardiac digital twins) have the potential to support precision cardiology by helping clinicians tailor treatments to individual patients. Their practical adoption, however, remains limited by the substantial computational cost of detailed biophysical simulations.

In this work, the authors introduce a lightweight Physics-Informed Eikonal model that reproduces key biophysical phenomena of cardiac electrical propagation, together with clinically relevant electrograms, in near real time. The model was validated against a state-of-the-art cardiac electrophysiology model in complex arrhythmia scenarios, including scar-mediated ventricular tachycardia in a human whole-heart model.

By combining high computational efficiency with physical fidelity, the proposed approach provides an important enabling technology for the calibration and application of cardiac digital twins in research, industrial and clinical settings.

Publication in Nature Communications, a leading multidisciplinary scientific journal, represents a major achievement for the entire research team and highlights the relevance of this work for computational cardiology and personalised medicine.

Congratulations to all the authors!

The open-access paper is available at this link.