A collaborative study using personalized heart digital twins to pinpoint cardiac abnormalities and guide treatment has been honored with the 2025 James T. Willerson Award in Clinical Science from the journal Circulation. The award recognizes the best clinical paper published in the journal over the last 12 months.
The winning paper, “Personalized Heart Digital Twins Detect Substrate Abnormalities in Scar-Dependent Ventricular Tachycardia,” is a joint effort between St. George’s University Hospital and the Alliance for Cardiovascular Diagnostic and Treatment Innovation (ADVANCE) at Johns Hopkins University, where the work was led by Natalia Trayanova, the Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
First author Michael C. Waight was recognized for the achievement at the 2025 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in New Orleans on November 9.
“This paper is the first validation of heart digital twin prediction with invasive clinical measurements. This has never been done before. The results revealed that the heart digital twins were able to predict all the electrophysiological abnormalities in each patient,” said Trayanova. The research created digital twin models of the hearts of 18 patients scheduled for catheter ablation due to scar-dependent Ventricular Tachycardia (VT), a type of life-threatening arrhythmia.
The process involved utilizing contrast-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance images to construct detailed finite-element meshes of the patients’ hearts. Regional electrophysiological properties were then applied to these meshes, creating a personalized digital twin. These models were subsequently used to simulate VT induction with rapid-pacing protocols and precisely define the VT circuits, ultimately identifying the optimum ablation sites needed to terminate all VTs.
The study confirmed the personalized digital heart models are highly accurate. When researchers compared the models’ predictions against actual patient data, they found the predicted “trouble spots” were the exact locations where the heart’s electrical signals were slow or abnormal. This ability to precisely locate these problem areas validates the technology’s potential to significantly improve substrate-based ablation, giving doctors the confidence to directly target the arrhythmia’s source and make the procedure much more effective.
The full author list includes Michael C. Waight, Adityo Prakosa, Anthony C. Li, Nick Bunce, Anna Marciniak, Natalia A. Trayanova, and Magdi M. Saba.
Pictured above are (from left) Anthony C. Li, Michael C. Waight, Natalia Trayanova, and Magdi M. Saba with the 2025 James T. Willerson Award in Clinical Science at the AHA conference.