News

The CardioInsight ECGI system was cleared by the FDA. After 30 years of development and validation in CBAC Director Yoram Rudy’s laboratory, he hopes to see ECGI in clinical use in hospitals, helping to treat cardiac patients.

CBAC member George F. Van Hare III, MD, director of the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been named president-elect of the Heart Rhythm Society, a global research and education group focused on cardiac rhythm disorders.

CBAC member Arye Nehorai, the Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor of Electrical Engineering and chair of the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and his team have developed the first 3-D multiscale mathematical model of the electrophysiology of a woman’s contractions as they begin from a single cell to the myometrium, or uterine tissue, into the uterus

While working a Case Western Reserve University, CBAC Director Yoram Rudy, PhD had the idea for a game-changing cardiac monitoring device–a vest filled with more than 200 sensors that could detect the heart’s electrical activity. While standard 12-lead EKGs had become the gold standard for detecting many heart problems, EKGs still can miss cardiac problems because they only probe electrical potential at a limited number of points on the body.

Medtronic acquired CardioInsight Technologies, developer of a clinical noninvasive imaging system, called ECGI, for noninvasive mapping of the electrical activity of the heart and cardiac arrhythmias. The ECGI concept and methodology were developed in Professor Yoram Rudy’s laboratory with support from the NIH – National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Findings could lead to better treatment for cardiac arrhythmia and long QT syndrome.CBAC member Jianmin Cui, PhD, has received a nearly $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the molecular bases for the function of potassium channels vital for the heart, brain, inner ear and other tissues.

CBAC member Pamela Woodard, MD, led a team that designed a new imaging agent that may light up dangerous plaque in arteries.

CBAC alumnus Lihong Wang, the Gene K. Beare Professor of Biomedical Engineering, continues to build on his groundbreaking technology that allows light deep inside living tissue during imaging and therapy.

CBAC members Jianmin Cui, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering, and Mark Zaydman, fifth-year MD/PhD student, and a team of biomedical engineers has discovered that for one important channel in the heart, called KCNQ1, the membrane voltage not only causes the channel to open, but also determines the properties of the electrical signals, acting as both conductor and composer rather than only conductor as previously believed.

CBAC alumnus Samuel A. Wickline, MD, received the Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis. Wickline, the James R. Hornsby Family Professor of Biomedical Sciences, was presented with the honor at the Faculty Achievement Awards ceremony