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Human Heart

Improved accuracy for non-invasive techniques for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease

The project

EMPIR project <link research-innovation search-research-projects details>‘Metrology for multi-modality of impaired tissue perfusion’ (15HLT05, PerfusImaging) is working to develop physical standards and data analysis tools to assess the reliability of non-invasive medical imaging techniques for assessing blood flow delivered to heart tissue (called heart perfusion), thereby validating their potential use in the early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease.  Accurate quantification of perfusion is currently only possible through invasive measurements with catheters, which is a costly procedure with potential side-effects for patients.

The project has been mentioned in the latest book to be produced for the International Day of Radiology, which on 8 November 2018 focussed on cardiac imaging. The book, entitled ‘Heart Revealed. Radiology in the diagnosis and management of cardiac conditions’ is published by the European Society of Radiology in cooperation with the European Society of Cardiovascular Radiology. The EMPIR project is mentioned in Chapter 22: Cardiac imaging in radiology – the EFOMP perspective, where EFOMP is the European Federation of Organisations for Medical Physics. 

In addition, a paper entitled ‘Pixel-wise quantification of myocardial perfusion using spatial Tikhonov regularization’ by Judith Lehnert et al. has been published in the Institute of Physics journal Phys. Medicine and Biology.

This EMPIR project is co-funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the EMPIR Participating States.

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