PhD student Daniel Fyenbo from the Department of Clinical Medicine has developed a digital aid for colleagues and medical students who work with cardiology.

2020.11.23 | Nanna Jespersgård

An idea born in a New Orleans jazz bar. Developed with the help of colleagues in Aarhus. A labour of love written at home after hospital shifts. Equipped with extensive visual material from Austria. And now – after several years of hard work – available via Amazon and Apple Books.

These are five key events in the story of the interactive e-book Cardiology-2-Go, which Daniel Fyenbo is behind. He is a medical doctor and PhD student at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University.

Cardiology-2-Go is aimed at medical students and junior doctors, nurses and others, who both in theory and practice diagnose and treat heart diseases, including diseases related to the coronary arteries, congenital heart defects, heart failure and the heart’s electrophysiology.

Clinical practice and exam prep

”As the title suggests, Cardiology-2-Go is designed to be used on-the-go,” explains Daniel Fyenbo, who knows all about the need to quickly look-up something, both from his studies during medical school and from his subsequent position as registrar at the Department of Cardiology at Aarhus University Hospital.

"I qualified as a medical doctor in 2018, but still need to look things up during a busy working day – that’s true of all junior doctors and nurses. For example, let’s say that my sixty-year-old patient has exercise-induced chest pain and shortness of breath, and that I find a severe narrowing of the aortic valve – what we call an aortic stenosis," says Daniel Fyenbo, before getting his iPhone out to demonstrate the functionality of Cardiology-2-Go:

"And let's say I'm in doubt about the treatment strategy, then I can find disease-specific treatment information with just a few clicks – and even see the differences between American and European guidelines," says Daniel Fyenbo with a little smile.

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^{This is how it looks - the e-book Cardiology-2-Go, which has been Daniel Fyenbo's con amore-project during the las years. Photo: Jonathan Bjerg Møller, AU-Health.} 

Daniel is particularly interested in electrophysiology, including the effect of long-term treatment with a particular type of advanced pacemaker, which is also the subject of his PhD programme under the supervision of Clinical Professor Jens Cosedis Nielsen. The pacemaker that he is studying in his research is characterized by three electrodes, a so-called biventricular pacemaker, that is offered to patients with severe heart failure. Unfortunately, up to 30-40 per cent of the patients do not benefit from the treatment, and Daniel Fyenbo will therefore try to shed light on why this is.

Photos and video

Cardiology-2-Go is packed with extensive images of more than one hundred classic electrocardiograms (ECGs), echocardiographies and other audiovisual material such as CT images, X-rays, lung ultrasounds, ventriculographies and illustrative figures. This means that the user can see live images of any disease of the heart along with classic ECG features of the disease in question. This provides a basis for comparison in the process of diagnostic workup.

“It has been extremely interesting and an inspiration for me to discover just how many people are willing to help when you activate your network. The many images come from a company in Austria, 123Sonography, who were kind enough to help me, only because they could see the idea behind the project, and by chance, know the two doctors and researchers who I’ve published the e-book in collaboration with," says Daniel Fyenbo with reference to his colleagues at Health, Jens Sundbøll and Morten Schmidt, who collaborate with the Austrian company on a separate health app.

At a jazz bar in New Orleans

Jens Sundbøll was also the person who sowed the first seeds for the Cardiology-2-Go collaboration back in 2016. At the time, Daniel Fyenbo was a medical student on the Master's degree programme and was presenting a research project at the American Heart Association's big cardiology congress in New Orleans, Louisiana.

"I met Jens at the congress and we talked about his work with the e-book Internal Medicine, which he had written with his colleague Morten Schmidt, and which I and many other medical students in Denmark were diligent users of. And that’s where the idea of developing an international counterpart in cardiology came from," says Daniel Fyenbo. He still remembers the evening in November – at a jazz bar on Bourbon Street – where the first ideas for the e-book were jotted down on a napkin.

Today, after several years of idea development, preparation and writing, Daniel Fyenbo is happy that he took the plunge with the e-book project.

"I've learned so much along the way. About my subject, about easy-to-understand communication in words and images – and about overcoming ups and downs. I reckon I’ve spent four or five evenings a week writing over the last year, and to do that you’ve really got to be dedicated and have the support of those around you,” he says with particular reference to his girlfriend at the time, who fortunately remains his girlfriend today.

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Cardiology-2-Go – more information

• The wide-ranging interactive e-book comprises 23 chapters covering everything from ECG interpretation and echocardiography, to prevention of heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmias and heart attacks.
• The e-book systematically reviews different diseases and their definitions, epidemiology, causes, mechanisms, symptoms, diagnostic approaches, treatments and prognoses.
• The end of each chapter lists references to international treatment guidelines, online medical works and scientific articles.
• The publisher is StudySmart ApS, which the two Health researchers Jens Sundbøll and Morten Schmidt are behind.
• The e-book can be downloaded from Apple Books (for iOS) and Amazon (for Android) for a fee and was the best selling e-book in Denmark on Apple Books only two weeks after publication.
• Daniel Fyenbo does not expect the book to make him rich. Apple and Amazon also take a cut of any sales, and the large amount of time invested in the project means that it would have to sell a great many copies to pay for all the time he has invested in it.

Contact

PhD student Daniel Fyenbo
Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University
Email: daniel.fyenbo@clin.au.dk
Mobile: (+45) 4014 2318