About the project
The heartbeat stands as one of the most fundamental rhythms intrinsic to human life. Joanna Sulkowska’s doctoral research focuses on the cardiac muscle’s movements, which generate this life-sustaining beat. Joanna aims to combine human and machine intelligence to identify the early stages of heart disease by analyzing the motion of the heart captured on cardiac MRIs. In that way, early intervention can be implemented, enabling the heart to sustain vital blood flow to our cells for longer.
Curiously, cells can themselves flow, and through their synchronized motion, they form our internal organs, such as the heart itself, and ultimately our entire body. To learn more about how cell flows shape early human development, postdoc Joachim Mossige grows artificial human embryos from stem cells, which he studies in the lab under a microscope.
Microscopes are powerful tools and can even be used to study how our cells respond to (musical) rhythms, which is the focus of PhD candidate Dongho Kwak’s work. The natural cellular microenvironment is mechanically dynamic, and mimicking such conditions is vital in life sciences research. Dongho uses digital signal processing techniques to generate and manipulate audio signals to stimulate cell cultures with rhythmic sound vibration, creating a dynamic cell culture environment.
Finally, while microscopy images can provide invaluable insight, they represent information overload for researchers who must process large amounts of image data. Aside from eye fatigue, purely visual exploration of high-dimensional datasets can miss latent spatiotemporal patterns. PhD candidate Bálint Laczkó explores methods to uncover such patterns of cellular metabolism using sound, a technique known as image sonification.
Through bioRITMO, Joanna, Joachim, Dongho and Bálint seek to unravel the mysteries of biological structures by studying their rhythmic movement.