Project summary
Enabling precision medicine by “deep phenotyping” cardiovascular disease with imaging.
What is the issue for NSW?
By the time cardiovascular disease has become life threatening it is often very difficult to make sense of the complex changes that have occurred in the heart secondary to disease. Better, earlier descriptions of disease are vital. The lack of detailed phenotype information of common heart diseases limits the potential of powerful and fast evolving fields like genomics, pharmacogenomics and molecular biology.
What does the research aim to do and how?
The cardiovascular iBank will establish a powerful imaging databank designed to describe and measure common cardiovascular diseases using imaging and other techniques. Our approach will use advanced imaging and analysis to obtain “Deep Phenotypes” of common diseases as they evolve from the healthy state to symptomatic disease.
Accurate measurements of diseases such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, heart failure and structural heart issues like aortic stenosis will permit researchers to target interventions before diseases are irreversible. These “phenotype” signals will enable earlier detection, allowing intervention before diseases declare themselves via hospitalisation or death.
The iBank will enhance work in other non-imaging areas like genomics by providing a more complete picture of the whole patient, aiding cardiovascular “precision medicine” to become a reality.