50,000 Canadians will die suddenly this year. Many of them will die from a deadly fast heart rhythm called Ventricular Tachycardia or VT. The best treatment for VT is catheter ablation where the source of the problem is located and destroyed using tubes passed in to the heart. It is expensive invasive and can cause harm including death. We have developed what appears to be a safe effective non invasive alternative treatment called “radioablation” where we use a beam of X rays just like radio-therapy for cancer. Patients love it but it is difficult to perform, requires many trips to hospital and takes too long to organise. We have created software which allows us to treat patients faster better and easier. Also this software is a great tool to teach doctors elsewhere how to treat their patients.

Ventricular Tachycardia (VT) is a life-threatening heart rhythm disorder responsible for thousands of sudden cardiac deaths in Canada every year. Conventional treatment comprises drugs, defibrillator implantation surgery and catheter ablation procedures. Although successful in many these interventions are invasive resulting in pain, inconvenience and complications. Recently we developed and performed the first completely painless non invasive cardiac ablation for VT in Canada. We achieved this by combining two novel technologies; non invasive VT mapping with stereotactic cardiac radiotherapy to the arrhythmia circuit. In two years we have now treated 18 patients with exciting results. Current workflow for each patient requires multiple joint treatment planning sessions involving two Cardiologists and two Cancer Centre physician-scientists using four different imaging and targeting modalities. Complex logistics risk clinical error and delay patient treatments. Patients tell us they love this painless non invasive ablation but if we could improve one thing it is the delay in treatment. We seek to integrate these modalities into one remote automatic targeting software package so as to increase accuracy, expedite accurate treatment and facilitate uptake of this exciting new treatment modality in other Canadian centres.

“A 4D visualization tool for treatment planning of non-invasive radioablation in patients with ventricular tachycardia,”
http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.2654482