Rapid reliable volume status and ventricular function assessment by non-specialist staff using innovative imaging in clinical practice

Obiettivo

Many urgent medical settings require immediate assessment of intravascular volume status to initiate treatment and non-invasive monitoring of progressive changes in volume. Other diagnostic medical scenarios require urgent identification of impairment of ventricular function, to select appropriate initial treatment. With standard approaches, accessing this information quantitatively requires expert cardiological involvement, which introduces potentially harmful delay and unnecessary cost.

My research is a high-risk leap in the opposite direction to the obvious avenue. Instead of using increasingly difficult measurements to study an increasingly narrow range of specifically cardiac conditions, I will harness physiological knowledge with technological advances, to develop and validate devices that a novice can reliably use with little training, to make limited but reliable and clinically useful quantitative measurements. Specifically, I aim to:
• develop unique tools that support health care professionals with minimal training, to reliably acquire a limited set of echo measurements in patients
• experimentally verify the ability of novices to thereby track changes in volume status
• experimentally verify the ability of novices to detect abnormalities in ventricular function

The immediate impact of this research will be the development, and evaluation by clinical physiological experiments, of a system that guides a novice operator to obtain good images, and helps them to detect ventricular dysfunction and disorders of fluid status.

There will be numerous auxiliary benefits of this work. One will be the support tools for trainee echocardiographers/cardiologists who could get automatic, personalised guidance in improving image positioning in the early months of their work, making it easier to train these individuals who are in very short supply. Secondly, clinical practices and trials can use these tools to express image quality of echo measurements.

Meccanismo di finanziamento

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Istituzione ospitante

IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE

Contributo UE

€ 1 537 288,64

Indirizzo

SOUTH KENSINGTON CAMPUS EXHIBITION ROAD
SW7 2AZ LONDON
Regno Unito

Regione

London Inner London — West Westminster

Tipo di attività

Higher or Secondary Education Establishments

Contatto amministrativo

Scott C. Wheatley (Mr.)

Ricercatore principale

Darrel Francis (Dr.)

Collegamenti

Contatta l’organizzazione Sito web

Costo totale

Nessun dato

Beneficiari (1)