Category Archives: Cardiac Electrophysiology

Cardiac Electrophysiology

HRS Interviews – Molly Maleckar

While I didn’t have much luck with interviews at Heart Rhythm 2005, I did get two. Here is a transcription of the first, with Molly Maleckar from my own lab.

VS: So I’m here interviewing Molly Maleckar of Tulane University. Molly, how many times have you attended NASPE or HRS conferences?

Molly: Well, actually, technically when it was still NASPE, I attended the first one a few years ago in Washington, DC, this is actually my third time at NASPE/HRS, my third conference.

VS: And would you please try to summarize what you work on in the lab?

Molly: Sure, I’m here presenting a study which is about determining the defibrillation threshold from the upper limit of vulnerability, defibrillation shocks, but my main work has to do with developing a model of infarction so we can study arrhythmogenesis in the post-infarcted heart.

VS: Okay, and what do you see as maybe the upcoming hot foci in the field right now?

Molly: I think that our lab really has a leg-up because disease models right now are really what’s happening. People are doing a lot of experimental work and have been for probably the last ten years in terms of ion channel kinetics and gross effects on the defibrillation efficacy of post-injury heart situations, but they’ve really — mechanistically there’s not a lot of insight, so I think our lab has really got it down. We’ve got ischemia 1a, 1b, the infarction, and I think that that’s really where it’s going.

VS: What about mechanical [mechano-electric] feedback?

Molly: Also extremely important, of course I didn’t think of that since I’m not working on it, but also Wendy in our lab does that — that’s the next step. The ideal would be to have a computational model of the human heart, post infarct, with a little bit of heart failure thrown in there [with mechano-electric feedback]. That’s probably fifteen years away, maybe ten, maybe less, but definitely those are also very important things to look at now.

VS: Alright, thank you Molly.

Molly: No problem.

Next, maybe tomorrow, I’ll post my interview with Martin Fink of UCSD.

GRC Entries Complete

I just finished the last of my Gordon Conference backdated entries, which should have been done long ago. Copying notes out of my journal was somewhat arduous, and compounded by the fact that I wasn’t properly dating and number pages in it then like I do with my paper journals now.

I mention in the final GRC post that I need to brush up on my molecular biology, and checking which classes are available is something that I plan to do this afternoon. I’ll probably replace my Cell and Tissue Engineering course with one in molecular biology. I may also need to downgrade my statistics course. Rob scared me talking about how hard the lower level statistics course was, and it’s a prerequisite for this one that I was going to skip. No more.

On with the Next Actions list until I hear from Amanda, at which time I’ll probably transition over to Indonique.

Gordon Research Conference: Day Four

The first notes I have for the day are from a talk by Alexy Zaitsev titled “Many Faces of Ventricular Fibrillation in the Ischemic Heart,” a title which he gradually worked up to from something much simpler, given what a complex issue it is.

I was very excited when he came to speak at Tulane last year, given that he does experimental work on ischemia, which I study via simulation. One interesting thing that he talked about was that he induced ischemia after ventricular fibrillation, and watched how it affected the fibrillation. He showed that [K+]O elevation results in organization of VF.

After Dr.Zaitsev, Alan Karma spoke about Nonlinear Dynamics of Reentry and Fibrillation. He covered mechanisms setting up a heterogeneous substrate.

That was the day that I put my poster up and subsequently defended it against quite the barrage of questions. It helped me to realize that I really needed to get on top of the material better.

Was it only four days? I thought it was longer. Anyway, that’s the last of the notes that I have. Oh right, I think we skipped a bit :). Also, for some things like molecular biology, I didn’t really take notes, as I was totally lost. I’m going to try to amend that by taking some molecular biology classes next academic year.

Kalyra

This is out of order, but I’m concentrating on other things. Here we are at Kalyra this afternoon. It was featured in the movie “Sideways.” From left to right: Blanca, me, Natalia, Molly

We bought a couple of bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon after tasting their selection. The Gewurtztraminer was amazing, we may go back and get some tomorrow!

Vanderbilt trip, &c.

I had an interesting trip to Vanderbilt. We left on Wednesday evening via Southwest airlines, which was a new experience for me. I’m used to assigned seating, rather than the whole A/B/C thing they do. Imagine how much less they have to spend on keeping track of who is seated where. We got to the airport well in advance, but were still given ‘b’ boarding passes. We figured out later that this is because most of the A people use online check-in. We used it on the return trip. Anway, the trip basically consisted of two pretty intense days of research discussion. Both days we had coffee and boxed lunches provided, and basically sat in one room all day.

As the Vanderbilt group we were meeting with does a lot of magenetic work, many of the rooms we saw were Faraday cages, which got to be kind of eerie. Nothing like the comfortable feeling of a metal box for a room. Also, Vandy has basements in all of the buildings, with the numbers starting at 1 for the lowest floor. This was somewhat confusing. I prefer ground to be 1 and basement levels to be reverse order, B1, B2, B3 etc as you descend. Ah well.

Anyway, here’s a link to a picture (because it’s kind of big) of all of us toward the end of the last day. We had one absentee who was added via the magic of photoshop later. Can you figure out who it was?

The trip home was uneventful, except for one minor incident on the plane. On the way out, the person in front of me put her seatback in the full reclining position, cutting into my already seriously deficient personal space. On the way back I was prepared. I put my feet up on my briefcase in such a way as to be able to block the seat from moving back. Sure enough, the only person in the row in front of us who decided to put her seat back was the one in front of me. She seemed very frustrated about the seat not moving as far back as she expected, though she never looked behind her to see what might be preventing it. Score one for me and my (barely) adequate seating room on the way home.