Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Heart disease remains a leading cause of illness, disability, and premature death for Canadians. One of the primary medical imaging technologies for diagnosing, monitoring, and managing various forms of heart disease is echocardiography (echo) or cardiac ultrasound. Echo is non-invasive and essentially risk free, enabling physicians to use it in all types of patients. This valuable imaging capability however, is often available only in larger urban areas and regional health care centres, as specially trained technicians (sonographers) are needed to perform an echo exam to acquire the specific images physicians need for clinical decision-making. Further, even where echo is available, the high demand for this imaging technology has led to unacceptably long wait times in some regions, due in part to a shortage of expert sonographers. In this proposal, we aim to develop and apply "information intelligence," a rapidly growing data analytics technique, to echo imaging. This technique would allow accurate and reliable measurements from echo that is relatively independent of the sonographer's experience. Development of this information intelligence platform would improve access to echo, decreasing the disparity in terms of availability and access between rural or isolated regions of the country and larger cities, as well as reducing wait time in urban centres. This is because echo can be performed by a greater number of sonographers over all levels of experience, and high quality measurements can be achieved more efficiently.