Post-doctoral position in automated analysis of (high-frame-rate) echocardiography

Employer

University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Description

This project will be conducted at the Cardiovascular Imaging & Dynamics laboratory (KU Leuven, located within the Medical Image Research Center (MIRC) at university hospital Gasthuisberg, Belgium). Within the MIRC, the post-doctoral researcher will work closely with engineers, physicists, clinicians and medical scientists, fostering collaboration within a dynamic research team. Project context Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction remains difficult to diagnose because clinicians lack a reliable non invasive measure of myocardial stiffness, a key determinant of diastolic function. This project builds on a long standing research effort within our research group to advance cardiac shear wave elastography as a non-invasive method to quantify myocardial stiffness. Over the past years, we have been developing and refining the technique within our lab, and this post-doctoral project continues that trajectory by focusing on further automating the pipeline using AI where appropriate, in order to prepare the technique for validation in large patients cohorts and integration into clinical workflow. Project description Shear wave elastography visualizes the heart using high frame rate ultrasound (up to 5 kHz – 100x the frame rate of conventional echocardiographic imaging), to detect shear waves that travel along the cardiac wall. Shear waves can be induced naturally by mitral or aortic valve closure. An interesting property of these waves is that their propagation speed is intrinsically linked to the operational stiffness of the tissue in which they propagate. In current practice, however, the measurement of wave speed is highly operator dependent. Subjectivity in these measurements arises primarily from the operator’s role in acquiring and analyzing data, resulting in variability of the measurement and thus interpretation. Causes for this variability can be differences in probe positioning and shear wave analysis settings, directly affecting the sensitivity and specificity of the technique. While operator experience and training are important for ensuring consistency, the primary focus of this project is on optimizing the shear wave analysis workflow by minimizing all user interactions. In this way, we want to make this novel technique more practical in routine clinical practice. To address this need, we aim to automate the workflow to significantly improve the efficiency, accuracy, and reproducibility of shear wave elastography post-processing, a critical step toward clinical translation. This project leverages our long standing expertise in cardiac shear wave elastography and a unique dataset of ~1 600 subjects acquired since 2018, providing the foundation for developing and validating data driven components within the automated pipeline. The developed automated analysis pipeline should comply with the Medical Device Regulation (MDR) in order to facilitate technology transfer to medical device companies.

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