Graham A. Wright, University of Toronto, “MRI for Guiding RF Ablation in Ventricular Arrhythmias”

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“MRI for Guiding RF Ablation in Ventricular Arrhythmias”

Dr. Graham A Wright is the Director of the Schulich Heart Research Program at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, a senior scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute, and a professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Wright was appointed the Canada Research Chair in Imaging for Cardiovascular Therapeutics in 2010. He also recently served as President of the International MR Angiography Club and Chair of the Interventional Study Group of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

The research focus of Dr. Wright’s group is cardiovascular imaging, with an emphasis on MRI. This effort includes basic biophysics to characterize the relationship between MR signals and underlying pathophysiology in blood and tissue; engineering to develop more effective methods and devices to acquire, analyze, and visualize medical images; and application of these tools to assessment, treatment planning, and therapy guidance in ischemic and structural heart diseases, complex arrhythmias, and peripheral vascular diseases.

Together with trainees and collaborators, he has published over 144 peer-reviewed papers and 400 conference abstracts, which have garnered numerous awards and resulted in 20 patents. For this work, he has received substantial peer-reviewed infrastructure and operating grant funding.

Abstract

“MRI for Guiding RF Ablation in Ventricular Arrhythmias”

MRI, with its exceptional soft tissue contrast, can provide critical information to improve outcomes of ablation therapy for ventricular arrhythmias. There is growing evidence that regions of heterogeneous infarct associated with slow conduction and re-entry circuits can be depicted as areas of intermediate T1 relaxation in gadolinium-enhanced MRI of the heart. Combining MRI maps with electrical information through computational models could facilitate more effective treatment planning and ablation targeting. MRI also has the capacity to visualize tissue damage associated with the ablations, providing the potential for rapid assessment of treatment effect. These advances are motivating the development of integrated systems for direct MRI guidance of ablation therapies in cardiac electrophysiology.

 

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