A new state-of-the-art facility dedicated to pediatric cardiac imaging and intervention is going to be co-established by NIH and Children’s National Medical Center in Washington D.C. The Center will combine cardiac imaging expertise at NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) with clinical care at Children’s hospital. Heart problems in children are rarer than those in adults, but they represent a significant burden on children and their families. Almost one percent of newborns which is more than 35,000 babies a year, have a congenital heart defect many of which can be life threatening.
Identifying and repairing these defects in children or infants requires overcoming unique challenges. These challenges include working on smaller and more delicate hearts, the difficulty in having children lie still for imaging procedures, increased sensitivity to radiation damage from X-rays, and the need for supportive devices like incubators.
The NIH and Children’s “National Interventional Cardiac Magnetic Resonance” (ICMR) program will bring together researchers, clinicians, engineers, and physicists to overcome these obstacles. Working at the new ICMR suite at Children’s and NIH, the ICMR team will focus on technology development predominantly for radiation-free MRIs.
Initiatives will include speeding up and increasing the quality of MRI machines to reduce the need to sedate children receiving an MRI, increasing the capability of MRIs to take fetal images, developing better pediatric-specific catheters for probing the heart and blood vessels, and incorporating an incubator into an MRI scanner to enable procedures on premature babies.
NHLBI research teams recently demonstrated that an MRI-guided catheter procedure can be as quick and effective as an X-ray guided procedure and are working on a next generation CT scanner that can take ultra-fast images while reducing radiation exposure by more than 90 percent.
“This partnership truly exemplifies the NHLBI mission,” said Gary H. Gibbons, M.D., Director of NHLBI. “By working with an esteemed partner in our community, we can start translating research advances to the bedside of children across the world. Together we may greatly reduce, or possibly even avoid, the need for invasive surgery or potentially harmful radiation when diagnosing and treating children with heart problems.”