ProCardio
Many heart diseases have a chronic course with expected worsening over time, such as valve diseases, heart failure, heart muscle diseases and heart damage after cancer treatment. It is important to find the right time to initiate a treatment in the form of surgery for the heart valve or insertion of an implantable defibrillator. ProCardio will develop, test and quality-assure tools that can reliably predict an individual patient's disease progression, and provide a far-reaching perspective on future, possible forms of treatment and prevent disease from developing further.
As a leader of the ProCardio work package for Valvular Disease, Associated Professor Helge Skulstad, MD, PhD, aims to develop automatic detection of severe valvular heart disease to foster better diagnostic understanding and solutions and to translate these into improved clinical practice.
The aortic valve is the valve oxygen-rich blood passes through before entering the aorta, the largest blood vessel in the human body. One of the most common and serious valvular heart diseases is called aortic stenosis. This is a condition where the aortic valve is thickened and calcified. The valve is narrowed and the left ventricle has to increase its struggle to pump the blood into the arteries. There are several complications linked to aortic stenosis such as abnormal heart musculature, heart failure and heart attack.
Helge Skulstad, Head of the Cardiac Imaging Section, Department of Cardiology, Rikshospitalet, OUS, is also the leader for the research group Integrated Cardiovascular Function that studies cardiac mechanics in experimental models and in patients. The general objective is to gain new insights into mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and to develop new imaging modalities which quantify disease processes and cardiac function.
The group specifically focuses on investigating mechanisms of left ventricular (LV) dyssynchrony and the development of better methods for selecting patients for Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT).
Another area of interest is investigation of LV diastolic dysfunction mechanisms and the development of better diagnostic methods for diastolic heart failure.
Read more about ProCardio and the research at this Center for Innovation.