• Blood-Brain barrier opening
• Electromechanical Imaging
• Harmonic Motion Imaging
• Myocardial Elastography
• Pulse Wave Imaging

The heart is an electromechanical pump: for the myocardial cells to contract, they need to be electrically activated. In the healthy heart, natural pacemakers in the sino-atrial node generate propagating action potentials producing a depolarization wave that eventually covers the whole myocardium. Because the conduction properties of the diseased heart are different from normal tissue, the timings and patterns of this wave can be use to localize and characterize the diseased regions. However, as of today, there is no non-invasive method available clinically to track this wave.
This project aims at tracking, instead of the electrical activation itself, the propagation of the resulting early mechanical activation, whether it is through incremental displacements or strains. Effectively, when a tissue is electrically activated, it begins to contract almost immediately; therefore, by using high frame-rate elastographic techniques, it is possible to reach sufficient temporal resolution and displacement estimation precision to detect the onset of such a contraction. By following the resulting wave front, it thus becomes possible to map what we call the electromechanical wave, which provides information about both the electrical and mechanical properties of the heart.