VTT Technical Research Centre has developed a method based on cardiac MRI, currently in research use, to help physicians identify disease-related changes of the heart at an early stage.
In dilated cardiomyopathy, the heart dilates and impaired contraction of the left ventricle leads to heart failure.
The disease may be suspected based on symptoms and an enlarged cardiac shadow revealed in a chest X-ray, for example.
The diagnosis is typically verified by cardiac ultrasound examination.
At an early stage, minimal changes of the heart are difficult to observe with ultrasound because their distinction from normal variation can challenge even an experienced cardiologist.
The method developed during VTT's cooperation project utilises data on variations in cardiac muscle measured with MRI scans taken from different projections.
Cardiac MRIs of the patient are compared with data on normal variation in healthy hearts, and with disease-related variation in healthy and sick hearts.
This corresponds to the knowledge of an experienced physician on the appearance of cardiac MRI images and their deviations.
With the help of this method developed by VTT, the essential information for diagnosis is available for all physicians regardless of their experience in interpreting cardiac MRIs.
Measurement values have been identified with the help of MRI to enable diagnosis at a very early stage of the disease.
The key issue of the method is to develop a new visualisation technique, which enables presentation of essential information from a very large measurement set in an interpretable form.
In addition, this research has developed a disease index representing the severity of disease, which offers a simple method for monitoring the disease and its treatment, for example.
The developed methods will be first applied, in a research context, to research and analysis of changes produced by various diseases and disease mechanisms.
Later, the goal is to provide a method for clinical use to assist physicians in diagnosing.
The research will be explored further by applying the methods in the research of other heart and brain diseases.
In addition to imaging data, the analysis method will include cell metabolism data acquired from blood samples, for example.
