Dr. Daniel Ennis Awarded UCLA Laubisch Cardiovascular Research Grant 2008
Diffusion Tensor MR Imaging
DTMRI data displays the micro- structure of a heart. The shape and color scheme help to highlight the regions of different structural organization.
Dr. Ennis proposed to use DTMRI to examine the microstructural organization of healthy adult human hearts. The goal of the proposed work is to create an atlas of normal adult cardiac microstructure that'll serve as a basis for improving our understanding of how cardiac microstructure is altered during the course of disease.
A collaborative team comprised of Drs. Paul Finn (DCVI), Alan Garfinkel (Medicine and Physiological Science), and Michael Fishbein (Medicine and Pathology) will use diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTMRI) to examine the microstructural organization of healthy adult human hearts.
that will serve as a basis for improving our understanding of how cardiac microstructure is altered during the course of disease.
Ventricular fibrillation, in which the electrical rhythm of the heart becomes chaotic and the pumping function of the heart dramatically decreases, is an active area of research at UCLA in the laboratory of Dr. Garfinkel. In order to test whether their current non-human models of ventricular fibrillation translate to ventricular fibrillation in human hearts, they need human heart DTMRI data.
Remarkably, very little DTMRI data exists for healthy human hearts and even less is known about diseased human hearts.
