for cardiovascular imaging
Three-dimensional diagnostic images of the heart analyzed at the bedside may be possible in the future thanks to a five-year $7.2 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) bioengineering research partnership (BRP) grant to a team of engineers, scientists and physicians at the School of Medicine.
The grant from the NIH National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute will be used to help develop both hardware and software for automated analysis of three-dimensional images of the heart. The team of investigators from Yale, the University of Washington and Philips Medical Systems will collaborate to develop and validate a new, quantitative bedside imaging approach for the heart based on mathematical modeling.
Principal investigator James S. Duncan, professor of biomedical engineering, diagnostic radiology and electrical engineering at Yale, will partner on the project with cardiologist Dr. Albert J. Sinusas, professor of medicine and diagnostic radiology at Yale. Duncan and Sinusas have collaborated for 15 years on projects to develop technologies for understanding the complex deformations of the heart. Duncan also directs the Yale Image Processing and Analysis Group, which is involved with projects on image-guided neurosurgery, image-guided radiotherapy and several other biomedical image analysis projects.
"This BRP grant for 4D echocardiography, or analyzing time sequences of 3D ultrasound images of the heart, is intended to develop and validate a potentially new low-cost technology that could be applied at the bedside of heart attack patients," Duncan says. "It will also be aimed at those with long-term cardiovascular risk and be used to evaluate medical or novel alternative therapies like genetic or stem cell therapy."
Heart disease remains a major health problem in the United States, and the accurate and early evaluation of injury following a heart attack is critical for predicting further cardiovascular risk and optimizing therapy. The ultrasound approaches developed by this grant may ultimately be used in the emergency room or at the bedside in the coronary care unit for fast and safe care of the often critically ill heart attack patients.
The Yale group will collaborate with Matthew O'Donnell, dean of the University of Washington College of Engineering, who is a leading expert in ultrasound physics and imaging. The real-time three-dimensional imaging system for the project was developed by a team of engineers led by Karl Thiele at Philips Medical Systems.
"I anticipate that with this image analysis, we will be able to explore how the heart repairs itself after a heart attack by relating changes in local deformations of the heart with physiological information at the cell and organ level," says Sinusas.
Recently, using magnetic resonance imaging, a more expensive technology, Sinusas and Duncan demonstrated a relationship between deformity in the heart and regional activation of an enzyme involved with the repair process following injury to the heart.
"I look forward to working with this multi-faceted team of individuals over the next five years to develop, validate, evaluate and hopefully translate the new ultrasound technology and approach to clinical practice," says Duncan. "The proposed development of a non-invasive, accurate, 4D ultrasound approach for tracking and quantifying the biomechanical properties of the heart will allow us to better stratify cardiovascular disease, which in turn will lead to improved diagnosis and treatment."
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