A Better Way to Predict Arrhythmia
The cells in the human heart are connected electrically, and the resulting synchronous behavior produces phenomena that have long fascinated Natalia Trayanova. Not all of these phenomena are beneficial, however, and Trayanova, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, has been studying one that's particularly harmful: arrhythmia. Sudden cardiac death is a leading killer in the industrialized world, and arrhythmias, or abnormal heart rhythms, cause a large proportion of those deaths, according to the American Heart Association journalCirculation. "If you want to make an impact," working in this area of cardiac research "is a place where the impact would be really large," Trayanova says. "That's what I really like."
by Christina Cooke, read more in hub.jhu.edu/magazine