For students:

For an overview of our past and current research please check our research page.

Welcome to the Biophysics Research Group at Ghent University, led by Prof. Nele Vandersickel. We study cardiac arrhythmias through a new lens: topology.

Our goal is ambitious: to build a unified framework for reentry-based arrhythmias that lead to novel treatments. By combining computational models with clinical data, we translate theoretical insights into clinical solutions. This approach has already led to a novel ablation therapy for atrial tachycardia1,2,3,4. We have received the AstraZeneca award for this research .

We believe science should be open and collaborative. That’s why we continue to develop OpenDGM, an open-source platform for analyzing electro-anatomical data using phase mapping, network theory, and topology. This enables flexible pipeline development across computational, experimental, and clinical datasets.

Join us in rethinking cardiac dynamics.

OpenDGM

We have developed a open source package called OpenDGM which can analyze any type of clinical, experimental or simulated dataset.

Initially, DGM was short for directed graph mapping, as it created a directed network of the cardiac excitation. However, we have extended the package to also incorporates phase mapping and topology.
OpenDGM can detect anatomical reentry (macro and localized), functional reentry (also called rotors) and focal activity. By creating a pipeline custom for a particular dataset (clinical, experimental or simulations), OpenDGM can find the location and type of the source of the arrhythmia. OpenDGM has been most extensively tested on clinical and simulated cases of Atrial Tachycardia, but we are also working on Ventricular Tachycardia, Ventricular Fibrillation, Torsade de Pointes and Atrial Fibrillation.

Learn more!

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