Ischemic heart disease (IHD) refers to a class of heart disease that stems from reduced oxygen supply to the heart muscle and is the most common cause of death in the western countries. The focus of the program is to better understand IHD from the standpoint of structural, compositional and functional changes to the heart in the early, progressive and terminal stages of the disease using an integrated multidisciplinary approach.
This is accomplished with sophisticated imaging technologies, particularly MRI and PET, biomedical engineering methods, molecular Immunopathological studies, multi-omics and informatics.
Funded both by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, the IHD program has a long-term goal of early diagnosis of disease through development of biomarkers for non-invasive, early and reliable detection of myocardial injury in the progressive phase of disease advancement. The major thematic areas of foci that are driven to advance integrated therapeutics for IHD are represented in the corresponding illustration.