A breakthrough in computational medicine is helping one professor uncover the heart’s ticking “time-bomb.” Ioannis Kakadiaris, director of the Computational Biomedicine Laboratory, is collaborating with cardiologists from the Association for Eradication of Heart Attack in this research effort. With cardiovascular disease accounting for twice as many deaths as all cancers in the United States combined, the professor of computer science is providing clinicians with a new assessment tool to alert physicians to a heart attack risk.

This “time-bomb,” also known as “vulnerable plaque,” is in the hearts of unaware, healthy-looking people or “vulnerable patients” who bear a more than 10 percent risk of having a heart attack in the next twelve months. Kakadiaris received a three-year, $566,350 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems to support his efforts to defuse these time bombs.

This imaging technology will give doctors the ability, for the first time, to detect “inflamed plaque,” representing regions of blood vessels prone to future rupture and sudden blockage.

A cross-sectional view of the interior of a human coronary artery, as captured by an intravascular ultrasound and UH’s Computational Biomedicine Lab ACES software. The darkest red spots indicate calcified deposits of advanced atherosclerosis, a symptom of coronary artery disease.

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