By Gabby Benedict, CEC Student Reporter

Yiwen Shi is a senior Bioengineering student in the Chemistry, Paper, and Biomedical Department at Miami who is working on his senior project this summer. He is learning how to use computational approaches to calculate cardiac fibers.

Shi first learned about this project from his current research mentor, Shijie Zhou, an assistant professor in the CPB department. Shi wanted to learn more about his research and selected one of Zhou’s projects as his senior project after being accepted into the Undergraduate Summer Scholars (USS) program 

“The goal of this project is to develop a novel approach for the prediction of ventricular tachycardia circuits using personalized computational heart modeling that incorporates the intramyocardial fat deposition (FAT-DEP) extracted from contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CE-CT),” Shi said.

Shi’s main goals while working on this project are to learn a sophisticated multiscale simulation approach and advanced image-based technologies, to gain an ability to conduct appropriate studies from a mentor's hands-on experience, to gain computational and programming skills, and to learn how to calculate patient-specific cardiac fibers.

Shi’s favorite part about his work is how he can feel himself improving throughout the research opportunity and while he builds his plans. One skill he has recently learned is how to use a mathematical approach to simulate cardiac left ventricular fibers.

Shi’s original plan when coming to Miami was to conduct studies, so working with faculty like Zhou who specialize in clinical translational studies has been a great experience that relates directly to his research interests. 

Shi has enjoyed working on this research and looks forward to pursuing a Master's Program under Zhou’s supervision at Miami in the future.