Albert Sinusas
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Imaging that can see blood flow, nerve activity and molecular change inside the body could improve how cardiovascular disease is treated and tracked. This research uses hybrid nuclear imaging, which combines SPECT or PET scans, sensitive images of injected radioactive tracers, with CT scans that show anatomy.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
Physiology
- Topics
myocardial infarction
heart attack
heart failure
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2029
What they work on
- Develop a multimodality imaging approach that uses early bright regions on non-contrast CT to guide hydrogel injection through the chest wall into injured heart muscle, in a pig model of reperfused heart attack.
- Test whether soft versus stiffening hydrogels change early heart wall mechanics and fibroblast activation, using SPECT/CT probes for fibroblast activation protein (FAP) and inflammation plus serial echocardiography and CT.
- Optimize dual-isotope PET/CT with 82Rb for blood flow and 18F-LMI1195 for sympathetic nerve activity, measuring resting and stress leg muscle flow in a pig hindlimb ischemia model with and without nerve block.
- Track how cutting the leg nerves changes regional blood flow and flow reserve over time and relates to medial artery calcification, using dual-isotope PET/CT in a chronic rabbit model.
- Test whether PET/CT imaging of leg blood flow, nerve activity and calcification predicts calcification progression, amputation and cardiovascular events in diabetes and PAD patients from the SCOPE-CLI and PORTRAIT registries.
More about the research
The imaging serves two problems. One is guiding a gel-based therapy into the heart after a heart attack. The other is understanding damaged blood flow and nerves in the legs of people with diabetes. Both projects move from large-animal models such as pigs toward clinical use.
Why it matters
Heart attack survivors could benefit from a less invasive, image-guided way to deliver hydrogels that limit heart enlargement and progression to heart failure. Patients with diabetes and peripheral artery disease could benefit if PET/CT imaging of leg blood flow, nerve activity and calcification helps predict amputation and cardiovascular events. Better prediction could change how these patients are evaluated and managed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yujun Cai
Yale University, CT·Pharmacology
Investigate how PDE10A drives vascular smooth muscle cells exposed to high phosphate to turn into bone-like cells and calcify, using PDE10A knockdown and inhibition in cultured cells and PDE10A-deficient animals.
Laura Hansen
Emory University, GA·Physiology
Test whether muscle satellite cells are required for exercise-driven recovery of blood flow, using a mouse exercise preconditioning model in which satellite cells are selectively ablated.
Katharine McGinigle
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify patient traits linked to different disease courses and treatment patterns after the first blood-flow-restoring procedure, using machine learning on data from the 1,830-patient BEST-CLI trial.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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