Personalized Cardiac Arrhythmia Treatment and Risk Stratification in Patients with Ischemic and Non-Ischemic Cardiomyopathies

Current clinical strategies for ventricular arrhythmia (VA) risk stratification and treatment remain limited by incomplete identification of arrhythmogenic substrates and pathways, leading to suboptimal prevention of sudden cardiac death (SCD). Personalized MRI-based virtual heart modeling provides a noninvasive means to capture patient-specific electrophysiological remodeling, particularly myocardial fibrosis and scar, which underlie re-entrant ventricular tachycardia (VT). In hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), existing criteria fail to identify all patients at risk for SCD, while in post–myocardial infarction (MI) patients undergoing catheter ablation, VT induction may be incomplete, poorly tolerated, or unable to reveal all critical circuits. In this seminar, I will present a series of advances in personalized virtual heart technology, including electrophysiological models, functional mapping, and MRI oversampling techniques that enhance reconstruction of fine-scale fibrotic remodeling. Together, these approaches aim to improve identification of arrhythmogenic substrates, enable more accurate SCD risk stratification in HCM, and increase the precision and efficacy of VT ablation planning in post-MI patients.

As an alumnus of UB Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Ryan O’Hara is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2023, where his dissertation research in computational cardiac electrophysiology advanced personalized risk prediction and noninvasive treatment planning for cardiac arrhythmias. His current research focuses on developing minimally invasive therapies for the treatment of arrhythmias in patients with congenital heart disease. Dr. O’Hara is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2016), ARCS Foundation Scholar Award (2022), Pediatric & Congenital Electrophysiology Society David Brooks Memorial Grant (2025), and an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship (2026).