CARDIA News
Houston's famous industries and University of Houston stimulate new avenues for research and collaboration • 12/03/07
A unique collaborative effort between Houston's largest Industries to explore potential crossover ideas and extract shared technologies has taken place on November 12, 2007 at the Pumps and Pipes 1 Conference. Much like moving oil through a pipeline, the heart must pump blood through the body. Our intention was to stimulate discussion, spark ideas and share new technologies between these industries that face similar challenges, even if on a very different scale. The sponsoring members were ExxonMobil, the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center of The Methodist Hospital, and the University of Houston.
Pumps and Pipes 1Detecting a "time-bomb": Heart attack risk-detection being developed at University of Houston • 01/03/06
Prof. Ioannis Kakadiaris and graduate student Sean O’Malley (Computational Biomedicine Laboratory) are collaborating with leading cardiologists, scientists and engineers from the Association for Eradication of Heart Attack, the University of Athens Medical School, the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, Aarhus University, and the University of Houston to enable physicians, for the first time, to detect microvessels growing in atherosclerotic plaques. These microvessels may indicate whether a plaque is inflamed; plaque inflammation is suspected to be a key factor deciding whether the plaque is vulnerable to future rupture (leading to heart attack or stroke). Early detection of these vulnerable plaques is essential in order to reduce the number of fatalities occurring every year due to heart disease. A press release about their technology is available here.
