A Johns Hopkins team has published landmark results showing that virtual replicas of individual patients’ hearts — so-called “digital twins” — can guide life-saving cardiac procedures with remarkable precision. The findings, reported April 1, 2026 in the New England Journal of Medicine, represent one of the first clinical trials of Read more
Researchers in the Trayanova Lab at Johns Hopkins University, led by ADVANCE member Dr. Natalia Trayanova, as well as ADVANCE members from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and other collaborators, have developed a new AI tool that significantly improves prediction of sudden cardiac death in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Read more
ADVANCE proudly announces that Natalia Trayanova, Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a global leader in computational cardiology, has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Heart Rhythm Society—the premier professional organization for more than 9,000 specialists in cardiac rhythm disorders across 90 countries. Trayanova, already Read more
Trayanova Lab Publishes Precision Ablation Study in Nature Cardiovascular Research The Trayanova Lab at Johns Hopkins University is excited to announce the publication of our latest research in Nature Cardiovascular Research, “Assessing the arrhythmogenic propensity of fibrotic substrate using digital twins to inform a mechanisms-based atrial fibrillation ablation strategy,” (direct Read more
Trayanova Lab’s and JHMI Digital Twin Research Featured in Wall Street Journal On March 16th, the Wall Street Journal featured Dr. Trayanova and her lab’s work with JHMI on “digital twins” of people’s hearts– a method of creating a patient-specific model to study electrical problems and potentially guide therapy in a clinical environment. Read more
The three awards will enable ADVANCE researchers to develop deep learning learning methods to understand the recurrence of atrial fibrillation following catheter ablation, artificial intelligence to predict the risk of sudden death in Sarcoidosis, and computational approaches for arrhythmia risk prediction in Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy. Principal investigator Dr. Natalia Read more
Access the PDF of their essay here or view directly in The Lancet.
We have received a lot of publicity following Dr. Dan Popescu’s publication in Nature Cardiovascular Research. The cover of the journal’s April issue was designed by Dr. Kimberly Popescu (Dan’s wife!), featuring a schematic of a neural network embedded in cardiac tissue. Dr. Natalia Trayanova was recently interviewed by NBC Washington, Read more
FDA just approved our 160-patient randomized clinical trial to demonstrate the utility of computer simulations driving atrial ablation procedure in patients with persistent atrial fibrillation and fibrosis. The approach is termed OPTIMA (OPtimal Target Identification via Modeling of Arrhythmogenesis). The PIs are Drs. Trayanova, Calkins, and Spraag — clinicians and Read more
