Computer modeling of intracoronary stents undergoing MRI scanning: simulating electrogenesis

The use of intracoronary artery stents in general medical care is increasing, as is the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning. We have developed software to model the risk of electrical generation from these intracoronary stents being placed in an MRI scanner´s magnetic field, while the heart is beating. This has not been specifically modeled in the past. We developed a pair of programs to first measure the coronary artery movement, from cine-MRI scans of the heart; we used this data to calculate local voltages between the stents and adjacent myocardial tissue in various locations of the heart using a software model. The software is written in RealBasic and Python under Macintosh OS X.