Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is the leading cause of death and disability in the world and is utilizing more and more healthcare resources. Reopening the blocked coronary arteries due to plaque buildup can restore the blood supply to the heart muscle and improve the daily function and survival rate of the IHD patients. However, those without a substantial amount of injured but still living heart tissue after a prolonged reduction in blood supply to the heart will not benefit from such procedure; therefore evaluation of the extent of dead versus still living heart muscle can prevent patients from undergoing the treatment that not only would not benefit them but may cause complications and increase demands on healthcare resources. Currently, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can be used to image the extent of dead and still living heart muscle in the IHD patients. However, a major drawback of MRI is their limited availability, particularly in the emergency situation of a sudden heart attack. Computed tomography (CT) is more readily available and a CT study is much faster and less expensive than a MRI study. We aim to develop a new CT imaging method that makes use of the recently available dual-energy technology to detect injured but living heart muscle as in MRI. The proposed technique requires injecting an x-ray dye to monitor the wash-in and wash-out of the dye in the heart muscle with CT scanning. The dynamic images of the heart acquired with CT scanning are analyzed with a newly developed mathematical model to estimate the levels of blood flow and retention of the x-ray dye in the heart muscle due to the presence of edema and dead muscle cells. These information can be used together to differentiate between dead and injured but still living heart muscle. The dual-energy technology can produce CT images of the heart with minimal image artifacts (errors) arising from the x-ray dye in the heart chambers hence the physiologic assessments with CT can be more reliable.