Zhu Receives NSF Career Award to Advance Cardiac Arrhythmia Research

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NORMAN, OKLA. – Cardiovascular disease affects nearly half of the adults in the United States, posing a significant public health challenge. To improve the diagnosis and treatment of one such cardiac condition, Rui Zhu, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award to uncover the mechanisms behind cardiac arrhythmias.

A healthy human heart beats in a regular rhythm, but cardiac arrhythmia disrupts this pattern due to malfunctioning electrical impulses in the heart’s muscular tissue. Zhu’s research focuses on modeling complex systems, and she plans to apply that expertise to tackle the challenge of modeling diseased hearts.

“Multiphysics simulations can give us a more realistic way to understand how arrhythmias work,” said Zhu. “But these simulations have mostly been built for healthy hearts. This is because, in reality, diseased hearts can be very different in anatomy, pathology, etc. That makes it difficult for conventional simulations to capture these conditions accurately.”

To address that challenge and provide a clearer understanding of the electrical, mechanical and fluid dynamics in arrhythmic hearts, Zhu will build off her previous modeling work with cardiac electrical activity and integrate deep-learning techniques with these computational simulations of the heart to understand how the multi-physical factors can contribute to arrhythmic conditions. 

Zhu’s plans are unique because current practice mainly focuses on understanding the heart’s electrical activity. As such, the primary diagnostic tool for identifying arrhythmias is a 12-lead electrocardiogram, or ECG, which measures the electrical activity of the heart by recording the heart’s electrical signals projected onto the body surface. Zhu’s examination of electrical, mechanical and fluid dynamics and their interdependencies will give a broader picture of what is happening in arrhythmic hearts.

Zhu is excited about the educational components of the project. “The goal of the educational activities is to foster a highly skilled health care workforce with a deep understanding of the arrhythmia physiology and the advanced methodologies developed in this project,” she said. With support from collaborators across educational and healthcare institutions, Zhu’s work will help train the next generation of the health care workforce to better understand a disease that affects millions of people in the United States. 

Zhu’s research has been honored with several paper awards at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences conferences. She earned a B.S. in industrial design and an M.S. in human factors in design from Harbin Institute of Technology and received her doctoral degree in industrial engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

NSF CAREER awards support early career faculty to serve as role models in research and education and lead advances in organizations. It is the organization’s most prestigious award for early career faculty.