Objective 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 functionThe 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. Programme(s) FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) Topic(s) ERC-SG-LS7 - Applied life sciences, biotechnology and bioengineering: agricultural, animal, fishery, forestry/food sciences; biotechnology, chemical biology, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, industrial biosciences; environmental biotechnology. Call for proposal ERC-2011-StG_20101109 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant Coordinator IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE Address South kensington campus exhibition road SW7 2AZ London United Kingdom See on map Region London Inner London — West Westminster Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Scott C. Wheatley (Mr.) Principal investigator Darrel Francis (Dr.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window EU contribution No data Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE United Kingdom EU contribution € 1 537 288,64 Address South kensington campus exhibition road SW7 2AZ London See on map Region London Inner London — West Westminster Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Scott C. Wheatley (Mr.) Principal investigator Darrel Francis (Dr.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Other funding No data
