Professor Michael Sacks has received a new $3.1 million R01 grant from the NIH to develop novel computational approaches to improve conventional methods of treatment for ischemic mitral regurgitation.
Ischemic mitral regurgitation (IMR) is a common complication of patients with heart disease or who have had a heart attack, affecting at least 300,000 Americans. As the population ages, this clinical problem is expected to grow substantially.
The condition occurs when a mitral valve, the main pumping chamber that regulates blood flow from the lungs into the left ventricle, functions poorly due to changes that occur to the heart’s architecture after an event that cuts off blood flow.
With a new four-year $3.1 million dollar R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Professor Michael Sacks will lead a team of UT Austin researchers to develop novel computational approaches to improve conventional methods of treatment for this condition. This work is part of a long-term collaboration between the Sacks group, working in the James T. Willerson Center for Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation and the Gorman Cardiovascular Research Group at UPenn Surgery.
Currently, IMR is treated by repairing the mitral valve with a surgery called and annuloplasty, where an undersized ring is inserted into the mitral valve to prevent it from leaking. However, one-third of patients who receive this procedure develop a recurrence of IMR within 6 months.
Using powerful supercomputing resources, Sacks and his team are developing novel patient-specific models to improve the annuloplasty ring design and surgery. These models will optimize IMR repair and reduce the need for trial and error approaches that would take a longer period of time if conducted solely through clinical wet lab experiments.
The overall goal of this project is to develop and design an optimized IMR repair approach using quantitative modeling.
