Novel multi-nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy approaches for the sensitive and robust assessment of human cardiac energetics

Altered cardiac metabolism is now recognized as an important component of many cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure.

Accurate assessment of cellular energetics promises significantly better disease staging and treatment monitoring in such conditions.

Current non-invasive techniques based on magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) are not precise enough to reliably define cardiac energetics in individual patients.

In this fellowship, I will develop new highly-sensitive MRS techniques for complete cardiac energetics assessment at 7T.

The main goals of this research are: - To establish a robust, patient-specific platform for cardiac energetics quantification, by developing novel approaches to overcome a range of technical challenges associated with 31P-MRS; - To develop advanced methods that will allow for complete assessment of cardiac energetics, including quantification of Gibbs free energy of adenosine-triphosphate (ATP) hydrolysis (deltaG), and of complete myocardial ATP fluxes; - To demonstrate the sensitivity of these novel methods to measure impairments in total cardiac ATP dynamics in patients with type II diabetes and to detect changes in cellular energetics that accompany the transition to heart failure.

These new measures will help provide unique insight into the pathophysiology of the failing heart and will be applicable in future studies monitoring novel metabolic therapies in cardiovascular disorders.