“Quo vadis cardiovascular informatics?”

Approximately 1.5 million heart attacks are suffered annually by Americans, and about half of them prove fatal, despite a host of new public health initiatives targeting heart disease and its aggravating factors such as obesity. The case of Former US President Bill Clinton, who underwent quadruple bypass surgery, demonstrates that even a former president with access to the best medical care available can have undiagnosed heart disease. Clinton himself blamed ldquoinsufficient vigilancerdquo and stressed the importance of repeated testing as a means of heart disease prevention. Considering the large amounts of data that a comprehensive vascular health screening will produce, there is an urgent need for biomedical image analysis tools (segmentation, shape and motion estimation) to assist in screening for the conditions that underlie sudden cardiac events. In this talk, we present biomedical image analysis tools for the mining of information from cardiovascular imaging for the detection of persons with a high likelihood of developing a heart attack in the near future (vulnerable patients).