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Areas of focus

Sunnybrook Research Institute's cardiovascular MRI research group focuses on the following areas:

  • Clinical Translation
  • Peripheral Arterial Disease
  • Regenerative Therapies for Ischemic Heart Disease
  • Electrophysiology and Arrhythmia

    Clinical Translation

    Collaborators for clinical translation projects include GE, Siemens, Circle, and Vista.ai.

    Ongoing Projects:

    • Image quality evaluation with cardiac implantable electronic devices (Lead: Calder Sheagren)
    • Cardiac ablation lesion evaluation in patients with arrhythmias (Lead: Terenz Escartin)
    • Evaluation of cardiac scan efficiency using an AI-assisted protocol (Lead: Labonny Biswas)

    Peripheral Arterial Disease

    The focus of this project is predictions of endovascular procedural success and long-term clinical outcomes in critical limb ischemia patients.

    We address gaps in knowledge about how to select patients for percutaneous vascular interventions. This study characterizes the superficial femoral artery chronic total occlusion using a novel MRI protocol, identifies imaging biomarkers of hard vs soft peripheral arterial lesion components, which impact procedure approach.

    This is an ongoing collaboration with Houston Methodist Hospital.

    Regenerative Therapies for Ischemic Heart Disease

    Excitement surrounds the use of stem cells, since these cells can potentially become functional cells of any given tissue. Stem cells implanted to a damaged area of the heart may be able to fully replace the damaged area in all the necessary aspects.

    This project requires the ability to:

    • Visualize the catheter needed to deliver the stem cells
    • Image (in real-time) the progress of the catheter movement and maintain knowledge of its orientation
    • Study the function in the neighbourhood of the cells
    • Characterize the general functions of the tissue such as wall motion recovery, perfusion, viability, proliferation and differentiation

    Ongoing projects:

    • MR-based myocardial tissue characterization in a regenerative model (Lead: Moses Cook)

    Electrophysiology and Arrhythmia

    Arrhythmias associated with heart attacks can lead to open-heart surgery, which involves slicing up the heart muscle to eliminate the irregular heart contraction. To reduce the severity of intervention, we are studying muscle ablation via radio frequency (RF) heating and pulsed fields.

    This study involves the ability to observe the delivery of the ablation to the desired place and imaging the ablation lesion.

    Ongoing projects:

    • Evaluating ablation therapies of cardiac arrhythmias using MRI biomarkers (Lead: Terenz Escartin)
    • Catheter device tracking and visualization for MRI interventional guidance of arrhythmia ablations (Lead: Jay Patel)