Ms Kiane Princiss Johnson, a 3rd-year student in Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Queen Mary Centre for Undergraduate Research (QMCUR), hosted by the Personalised Cardiac Modelling Lab (https://pcmlab.co.uk) and supervised by Dr Alexander Zolotarev and Dr Caroline Roney, has co-authored an article accepted for publication in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.

The article, titled: “Synthetic Fibrosis Distributions for Data Augmentation in Predicting Atrial Fibrillation Ablation Outcomes: an In-silico Study” by Alexander Zolotarev, Kiane Princiss Johnson, Yusuf Mohammad, Omnia Alwazzan, Greg Slabaugh, and Caroline Roney, makes a significant contribution to the field of cardiovascular medicine. It addresses the challenge of limited real patient data when training deep learning (DL) models to predict atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation outcomes.

The research team developed synthetic fibrosis distributions using a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model trained on 100 real Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE)-MRI distributions. These synthetic datasets were incorporated into 1,000 bi-atrial meshes derived from a statistical shape model, simulating AF episodes before and after various ablation strategies. This approach expands the training dataset for DL-based outcome prediction, enhancing model diversity and better capturing patient variability.

Kiane will also present her contribution to this work at the upcoming British Conference of Undergraduate Research (9th-10th April at Newcastle University). Her excitement is evident in her comment:

“I am very grateful for the opportunity that Dr Alexander Zolotarev and Dr Caroline Roney have given me to work on such interesting work. I would like to thank them both, as well as my entire team at the PCM lab for all their support while working on this research. I would also like to thank QMCUR for facilitating this research and allowing me to disseminate my work at the Industrial Liaison Forum and the British Conference for Undergraduate Research”.

Dr Giuseppe Viola, director of QMCUR, applauds Kiane for this remarkable achievement and extends his sincere gratitude to Dr Zolotarev and Dr Roney, for their excellent supervision and for fully integrating Kiane into their team.

He adds:

“This marks a pivotal moment, as it represents the first article co-authored by a QMCUR student, proving that undergraduates can make meaningful contributions to cutting-edge research. I hope this achievement serves as a boost for future research activities by Kiane and the PCM team, and that it will inspire other students to pursue similar accomplishments. Additionally, I hope it encourages more research groups to consistently strive for higher standards and expectations in undergraduate research projects”.