AI records electrical activity of heart cells

Led by the University of California San Diego and Stanford University, the method relies on recording electrical signals from outside the cells and using AI to accurately reconstruct the signals within the cells. The team’s findings are detailed in Nature Communications.

The electrical signals inside heart muscle cells provide insights into how the heart functions, how its cells communicate and how they respond to drugs. Capturing these signals typically involves puncturing the cells with electrodes, which can damage them and make large-scale testing complicated.

The key to the new technique is said to lay in extracting the relationship between the signals inside the cells (intracellular signals) and those recorded on their surface (extracellular signals).

“We discovered that extracellular signals hold the information we need to unlock the intracellular features that we’re interested in,” said Zeinab Jahed, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at UC San Diego, who is one of the study’s senior authors. Keivan Rahmani, a nanoengineering PhD student in Jahed’s lab, is the first author of the study.