Clinical Research Studies

The purpose of the proposed study is the creation of an initial functional atlas of the normal adult human heart, using data derived with cardiac MRI. MRI can provide high-quality 2D cross-sectional cine images of the heart, in arbitrary planes, which can be placed in spatial registration with each other relative to the reference frame of the imaging system. MRI can also acquire cine images with magnetization tags, which noninvasively create fiducial markers that can be used to track material points within the heart wall; these data can be combined to reconstruct the 3D motion pattern within the heart wall. A third capability of MRI is the acquisition of images of the velocity vectors of the moving blood within the heart and great vessels. We will use MRI to acquire such functional data on a stratified sample of ~100 subjects without heart disease, distributed over the ages of 20-89, and composed of roughly equal numbers of men and women. The racial/ethnic composition of the sample will reflect our urban population; from whom we will be recruiting the subjects; there will be a range of body sizes. The data for each subject will be mutually registered, and then used to create a model of the heart wall and the motion within both the heart wall and the cavity that captures both the overall average values for motion and its variance, and the associated systematic variation with sex, age, and body size. We hypothesize that the use of the data derived for these subjects, using these MRI methods with associated analysis tools, will enable us to define an initial set of normative values for regional cardiac function variables (a “cardiac function atlas”). We expect that this, in turn, will enable us to begin to explore the associated changes in regional cardiac function found in heart disease, and to assess the potential utility of this information for diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic applications.