There are a large range of diseases and therapies of the heart that can benefit from the information provided by a high-resolution, real time imaging modality. Diseases and abnormalities of the myocardium are due to problems of the heart muscle, ranging from infections to abnormalities in conduction, structure, and contraction. For these conditions, catheters are inserted into the heart chambers, without a direct view of the heart wall to obtain electrical measurements, take biopsies to detect cellular changes, or delivery energy to treat arrhythmias. It is our goal to develop tools for imaging the myocardium, which will provide cardiac electrophysiologist, cardiologist, and heart surgeons a view of the heart wall to aid in disease diagnosis and guide therapy.
Our objective is to develop high-resolution optical imaging modalities and image analysis for diagnosis and therapy monitoring of diseases of the heart wall. The driving force of this work is the unmet clinical needs within heart surgery and cardiac electrophysiology to assess myocardial substrates to evaluate where to deliver radiofrequency energy or where to biopsy.Our lab's work focuses on establishing a platform imaging modality including designing optical catheters and developing classification algorithms for real time imaging of the myocardium in the cardiovascular and cardiac electrophysiology laboratories. We aim to demonstrate that OCT can address unmet clinical needs of cardiac imaging by providing cellular-level imaging of the myocardium.
This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (EEC‐1342273) and the National Institute of Health (1DP2HL127776-01).
