About Us
Staff
The St. Francis Cardiac Imaging Core Laboratory staff consists of many seasoned and dedicated doctors, analysts, bioengineers, researchers, managers, and administrators who are integral to the development of new cardiovascular diagnostic and treatment modalities.
History
The origins of the St. Francis Cardiac Imaging Core Laboratory can be traced back to two frequently cited contributions to quantitative applications of cardiac imaging:
- The development of echo LV mass quantitation by Nathaniel Reichek, M.D. and Richard Devereux, M.D., (a research fellow at that time), at the Noninvasive Laboratory of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
- The St. Francis Heart Study, by Alan D. Guerci, M.D., President and CEO of St. Francis Hospital, and associates in the late 1990s, which first convincingly demonstrated the ability of CT calcium scoring to risk stratify a large(>4500 subjects) asymptomatic population for risk of future cardiovascular events, above and beyond the Framingham risk algorithm.
The former led to the development of echocardiographic core laboratories for a long series of clinical trials sponsored by Merck, Searle, Pharmacia and GlaxoSmithKline and core laboratories for multicenter trials using MRI supported by GE, Philips and Siemens(via the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance), Searle and Pharmacia.
The latter work on calcium scoring led St. Francis to commit its sizable research endowment to the development of a large scale research program in cardiac imaging. These two lines of development converged in 2000 to create the Cardiac Imaging Core Laboratory at St. Francis. The Laboratory has provided echocardiographic core lab support to studies sponsored by NIH (The Cardiovascular Health Study) and Novartis, as well as cardiac MRI core labs supporting studies sponsored by Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline.
