Sotirios Tsaftaris, Director of PRIAn and IMT faculty wins competitive grant from NIH (USA)

Sotirios Tsaftaris, (Assistant Professor and Director of the PRIAn Unit at IMT Lucca), has been awarded an R01 grant (the largest investigator driven grant) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in the USA. The grant was developed by Prof. Tsaftaris (co-Investigator, IMT / PRIAn) and Prof. Dharmakumar (the Principal Investigator from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and UCLA). The work is entitled ?Reliable Evaluation of Coronary Artery Disease using Myocardial BOLD MRI with CO2,? and proposes imaging techniques, acquisition protocols, and image analysis and pattern recognition algorithms that enable the assessment of cardiovascular disease without a single discomfort to the patient (no needles, no stress). PRIAn will be involved with developing all the registration, segmentation, and pattern recognition methods that enable the visualization and characterization of any underlying disease. The project is expected to run for 4 years and is a collaboration between Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and UCLA in Los Angeles, Siemens Medical Solutions, Thornhill Research, and University of Toronto. It is the first US grant from NIH to IMT faculty and is competitive and peer-reviewed with only the top 7% ranked proposals being funded.