Early Detection of Cardiac Rejection

Heart transplantation is the preferred treatment for patients suffering from end-stage cardiac diseases. Early detection of acute rejection is central to saving heart transplants and lasting the patients' lives. Since rejection in early stage occurs locally, traditional methods such as electrocardiogram and biopsy fail to localize regional myocardial rejection in early stage. In contrast, MRI holds the promise to unveil the volumetric functional landscape in the heart. Among many MRI protocols, tagged MRI can assist cardiac motion tracking, and contrast-enhanced MRI can help localize immune cells infiltrating abnormal myocardial tissues. The book starts with the fundamental principles of MRI protocols, followed by the state-of-the-art MR image processing techniques that can detect regional functional loss in early stage.

Hsun-Hsien Chang is a bioinformatics researcher in Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard Medical School. His research interests lie at the intersection of information science and biology, with the twin objectives of understanding the information theory in biology and of developing novel analysis tools for biological studies.