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MAE SEMINAR SERIES

Advanced Image Processing-Aided Novel Cardiac Stress Testing

Raj Shekhar
Department of Diagnostic Radiology
University of Maryland, Baltimore

Bioengineering Graduate Program
Adjunct Assistant Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Maryland, College Park

Wednesday, March 22, 2006, 2pm
Tompkins Hall of Engineering, 725 23rd Street NW, #204

Stress testing is a common approach for diagnosing myocardial ischemia, a state of blood supply and demand imbalance caused by narrowing of the coronary arteries. Exercise and other forms of stress raise the heart’s oxygen demand, failure to meet which sets in myocardia ischemia leading to left ventricular dysfunction. Stress echocardiography and stress SPECT manifest this dysfunction as abnormal left ventricular wall motion and thickening, and perfusion defects, respectively. These noninvasive techiniques remain the two most commonly prescribed cardiac stress testing procedures. Despite their frequent clinical utilization, these two procedures remain limited in their sensitivity and specificity. The focus of our research has been to increase the diagnostic accuracy of cardiac stress testing using echocardiography and SPECT. To this end, we will first describe the development of 3-dimensional (3D) stress echocardiography, a procedure that utilizes more powerful real-time 3D ultrasound instead of standard 2-dimensional ultrasound. Together with advanced image processing, 3D stress echocardiography is capable of overcoming many of the limitations of conventional stress echocardiography and therefore improving diagnostic accuracy. We will describe new algorithms for the correction of misaligned pre- and post-stress views, comprehensive visualization of time-varying volumetric data, automatic segmentation of the myocardial wall and quantitative diagnosis. Multimodality stress testing that combines 3D stress echocardiography and stress SPECT is the second novel procedure we are developing. This seminar will discuss the rationale behind multimodality stress testing, describe algorithms for multimodality image registration and present initial results.

Raj Shekhar received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from The Ohio State University; M.S.  in Bioengineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona; and B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India.  Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Diagnostic Radiology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.  He also is a Participating Faculty member in the Bioengineering Graduate Program and an Adjunct Assistant Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.  Previous experience has been with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Case Western Reserve University.  His research areas include multimodality imaging, FPGA-accelerated computing, 3D Ultrasound imaging, real-time tumor tracking, and Image segmentation / shape reconstruction visualization.