Grant: Engage Grants Program

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Canada and creates a heavy financial burden on Canadian health care. Early reliable diagnosis of heart disease is extremely important for treatment and management of cardiac patients. It is well known that cardiovascular disease results in significant abnormalities in blood flow in the heart chambers or vessels; however, the recent report from a multi-centre, multi-vendor clinical trial concluded that all existing commercial blood-flow analysis tools fail to provide accurate and time-efficient results using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MedVoxel Systems, Inc. is a leading medical imaging software company that develops analytic tools to measure blood flow, heart function and muscle stress for cardiologists and radiologists. To improve the accuracy of MRI flow measurements, a novel phase correction algorithm has been developed and implemented in the blood flow package by the MedVoxel R&D group. The objectives of this project are the following: (i) to evaluate the capability of this novel algorithm for background phase correction in clinical MRI flow studies; and (ii) to demonstrate its clinical feasibility to accurately diagnose vascular and valvular heart diseases. We believe that this new development can provide reliable information of blood flow measurement in an accurate and time-efficient manner for clinical cardiac MRI routines. Our new phase correction technique will significantly improve diagnosis of blood flow analysis in cardiac MRI experiments. As a result, numerous heart disease patients will be benefit from the result of this industrial partnership program.