Faculty Mentors:
Marcelo Di Carli, Joseph Loscalzo, Jane Leopold, Raymond Kwong, Raul San Jose Estepar, Paul Yu, Bradley Maron, Amil Shah
Our imaging group and collaborators from Radiology, Cardiology, and Pulmonary Hypertension have a strong interest, significant expertise, and an established track record of clinical research using advanced imaging techniques to evaluate the lungs and the right heart in patients with pulmonary vascular diseases, thromboembolic disease, and congenital heart diseases. The opportunities for imaging research in this area have been expanded recently by the launch of the Center for Pulmonary Heart Disease Program within the Heart and Vascular Center at BWH.
Marcelo Di Carli (Clinical Profile, Research Profile) has expertise and a strong interest in the use of quantitative PET to evaluate right ventricular metabolism and efficiency, and how to incorporate these imaging markers in assessing response to therapy in pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Joseph Loscalzo (Clinical Profile, Research Profile) is a cardiologist who has expertise in the pathogenesis and pathobiology of pulmonary vascular diseases and attendant cardiac dysfunction at the basic, translational, and clinical levels. He has a strong interest in imaging the molecular and metabolic mediators of disease.
Jane Leopold (Clinical Profile, Research Profile) is an interventional and molecular cardiologist with a strong interest in the pathobiology of PAH. Her research interests focus on the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying vascular stiffness and the role of neurohumoral activation in PAH. Studies in preclinical models of PAH use echocardiography and cardiac MRI to assess the RV and molecular imaging to examine pulmonary vascular remodeling. She is pioneering a clinical biomarker discovery program in pulmonary hypertension that incorporates echocardiography, high-resolution chest CT, and cardiac MR imaging in collaboration with Drs. Maron and Di Carli.
Raul San Jose Estepar (Research Profile) is Co-Director of the Applied Chest Imaging Laboratory at BWH and an expert in quantitative imaging biomarkers to phenotype pulmonary vascular disease and related disorders. His research group has developed novel imaging computational techniques that form the basis of the biomarker discovery pipeline to establish the clinical and genetics significant of chest diseases. His group has served as imaging core for the COPDGene study and the Framingham Heart Study Pulmonary Research Center among others.
Paul Yu (Clinical Profile, Research Profile, Lab Site) is a cardiologist and vascular biologist with expertise in pulmonary hypertension. In collaboration with Dr. Di Carli, he has started a discovery program for developing targeted molecular imaging approaches for the early diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension.
Raymond Kwong (Clinical Profile, Research Profile) is a cardiologist who uses MRI to evaluate RV structure and function. He is actively collaborating in a clinical trial that uses MRI and PET to evaluate RV structure, function, and metabolism in PAH.
Bradley Maron (Clinical Profile, Research Profile) is a cardiologist and vascular biologist with expertise in pulmonary vascular disease pathobiology. He is also the clinical leader of the cardiopulmonary exercise stress laboratory that provides support for clinical and research programs focused on mechanisms of unexplained dyspnea and pulmonary vascular disease.
Amil Shah (Clinical Profile, Research Profile) is a cardiologist who has a strong interest in HFpEF. In collaboration with members of the Dyspnea center, his research group has incorporated and validated the use of echocardiography in the setting of invasive cardiopulmonary stress testing for phenotyping left and right ventricular mechanics in patients with unexplained dyspnea.