The 2014 scientific sessions hosted by the Heart Rhythm Society are over, and there was a lot of news coming out of San Francisco. One of the items that caught my eye was a consensus statement by HRS and a couple of other physician societies about appropriate use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators for populations not well represented in clinical trials. The first question that occurs to the casual observer is; how seriously will government take this consensus standard? The background for this is in part the...

SAN FRANCISCO — This year's edition of the Heart Rhythm Society (HRS; Washington) scientific sessions included a presentation by Natalia Trayanova, PhD, of Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), who is spearheading an effort at the Hopkins computational cardiology lab to come up with a model for a virtual electrophysiology lab. She said this current effort is built around "an MRI-based modeling environment," with the objective being the acquisition of data from the level of molecules to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease for each individual patient based on that patient's specific features.