Helping heart surgeons see more clearly
Linwei Wang is blurring the lines of artificial intelligence and biomedicine research so that heart surgeons can see more clearly.
The associate professor in RIT’s computing and information sciences Ph.D. program is leading an international group of researchers and clinicians developing computational systems for creating individualized 3D imaging of a patient’s heart. With these 3D heart models, clinicians now have a noninvasive way to study their patients, helping improve patient care for cardiac arrhythmia and other heart diseases.
“Clinicians want to see how arrhythmia affects the heart physically, which unfortunately means using a catheter as opposed to just an EKG or MRI scan,” said Wang. “With our digital imaging, surgeons can spend hours studying a model of the patient’s heart, better preparing them before and after the procedure—all without negatively affecting the patient.”