Optical Imaging for Improved Cardiovascular Disease Diagnosis and Management

There are a large range of diseases and therapies of the heart that can benefit from the information provided by a high-resolution, real time imaging modality. My lab’s goal to develop optical tools for imaging the myocardium, which will provide cardiac electrophysiologist, cardiologist, and heart surgeons a view of the heart wall to aid in disease diagnosis and guide therapy.  In this talk I will discuss the steps we have taken toward clinical translation of optical technologies: optical coherence tomography (OCT) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and management. First, I will describe a project focused on classification of atherosclerotic plaques. I will present a method using depth resolved spectral analysis to identify cholesterol rich plaques within intracoronary OCT pullbacks of patients in vivo. Secondly, I will describe OCT and NIRS catheters developed for monitoring of radiofrequency ablation therapy for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias in vivo.  Lastly, I will end by describing our steps for procedural guidance by developing characterization algorithms to assess arrhythmogenic substrates.