Jiwon Kim
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
When a heart valve leaks or the heart muscle is damaged by infection, why do some patients get worse quickly while others stay stable for years? Standard heart scans measure how well the heart pumps, but they often cannot tell these patients apart.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
tricuspid regurgitation
right ventricle
cardiac magnetic resonance
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2031
What they work on
- Test whether right ventricle tissue injury, measured with high-resolution 3D LGE MRI (a scan that highlights scar) and extracellular volume mapping, predicts heart remodeling and worsening of the tricuspid leak in at least 265 patients with functional tricuspid regurgitation.
- Test whether poor right ventricle blood oxygenation, measured with quantitative susceptibility mapping (an MRI method that detects oxygen levels in blood), sorts tricuspid regurgitation patients by symptoms and exercise capacity better than standard heart-function measures.
- Determine whether baseline right ventricle scarring and poor oxygenation on heart MRI predict which patients benefit from TriClip, a catheter-based tricuspid valve repair, in at least 60 treated patients.
- Identify what drives poor quality of life and reduced exercise capacity (6-minute walk test) in at least 510 COVID-19 survivors from a multi-ethnic New York City registry, using heart MRI, ultrasound and blood biomarkers.
- Test whether heart muscle injury on cardiac MRI is linked to weak pumping after COVID-19, whether scarring predicts recovery, and whether injury predicts new heart failure, hospitalization or death.
More about the research
This research uses cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), a detailed MRI scan of the heart, to look at the heart muscle tissue itself: scarring (fibrosis), swelling, and how well the blood is carrying oxygen. Both projects test whether these tissue features predict symptoms, exercise capacity and survival better than standard measures of heart function.
Why it matters
Patients with leaky tricuspid valves now have catheter-based repair options, but doctors lack good ways to predict who will worsen or who will benefit. Scar and oxygen measurements from heart MRI could become imaging markers that help time and target valve repair. For millions of COVID-19 survivors, the work could show which patients have lasting heart injury and need monitoring or treatment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Right Heart Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Tissue Characterization for Clinical and Therapeutic Prognostication in Functional Tricuspid Regurgitation
NIH · Aug 2026 – Jul 2031
Cardiac Magnetic Resonance for Tissue Characterization Based Risk Stratification of Cardiopulmonary Symptoms, Effort Tolerance, and Prognosis Among COVID-19 Survivors
NIH · Sep 2021 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
Kara Goss
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify features that impair cardiac growth from childhood into early adulthood after preterm birth, building sex-specific growth curves from repeated MRI measures of left ventricular volume and mass with mixed-effect quantile regression.
Rizwan Ahmad
Ohio State University, OH·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and validate GeMM, an unsupervised reconstruction framework using a generative prior with multi-dynamic modeling, to produce 3D real-time cardiac cine and late gadolinium enhancement images from a free-running, ungated scan, starting with 3D digital cardiac phantoms.
Theodore Abraham
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how heart muscle function limits exercise in non-obstructive HCM by measuring regional and global myocardial strain with echocardiography at rest and at peak exercise, and relating it to exercise capacity.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
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