Novel medical device to improve catheter ablation outcomes in lethal heart rhythm disorder treatment

Doctor Minh Duc Nguyen, University of Sydney

Vanguard Grant - 2 Year

Years funded: 2025 - 2026

Heart-attack survivals are often implanted with implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) to prevent death from ventricular tachycardia (VT). However, repetitive shocks from ICDs will cause myocardial dysfunction leading to extreme distress, poor quality of life and depression for patients, and increase mortality by 5 folds. Cardiac radiofrequency (RF) ablation can reduce significantly recurrent shocks by removing the surviving muscle cells within the scar, created by the heart attack, that form circuits for VT. However, the ablation failure rate is still too high (> 50%) due to low accuracy in locating these channels of muscle cells. MRI/CT modalities cannot reveal the channels due to their microscopic size. The current practice is to observe local electrical signals inside the heart and electrically stimulating various sites to detect excitable channels. This method is time consuming, leading to longer procedure times in these very fragile patients and increasing complication risks.

We have developed a novel non-invasive bioimpedance device, LesioLogic, which can visualise ablation lesions for other arrhythmias in real-time to improve procedure’s efficiency and safety, thus reducing the procedure duration and patients’ risks to be re-hospitalised in the future. Therefore, LesioLogic can be utlised to monitor ablation on scar tissues, with its features fully adaptable to locating the VT circuit channels within the scar while being much more robust than the current practice method. Our recent ex-vivo experiments also found a new bioimpedance feature to distinguish between living cells and necrotic cells with high confidence which can further boost LesioLogic’s accuracy.

This project will test LesioLogic’s feasibility and accuracy in this application through experiments on large animal models. If successful, LesioLogic will become the first device to guide RF ablation to treat VT efficiently will be much more efficient to minimise ICD shocks and drug usage, reduce the life time treatment cost and improve quality of life. This transformative outcome will realise LesioLogic’s commercialisation pathway, generating IPs and attracting industrial investments.