The $50,000 seed funding from the Monash Institute of Medical Engineering is awarded to Monash University Research Lead, Dr Andrew Stephens, from the Faculty of Engineering and his team which comprises Clinical Leads, Dr Dion Stub and Dr Michael Seman from the Department of Cardiology at Alfred Health, to develop a better method whereby a patient could get a heart valve repair or replacement when needed and thereby resulting in better outcomes of the treatment.
Dr, Stephen while commenting on the project said: Valvular diseases is the dyfunction of any of the four valves in the heart and it involves aortic stenosis (narrowing of the aortic valve) and mitral regurgitation (back-flow through the mitral valve.
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He stress that the use of ultrasound to assess the severity of aortic stenosis to determine who needs a valve replacement is not capable of measuring the existence of mitral regurgitation in the heart and this often lead to patients being underdiagnosed and not receiving replacement valves when needed thus the need for this project.
Dr. Stephen then says that the project's aim is to improve ultrasound machines so that it will be able to detect the existence of mitral regurgitation automatically and likewise able to update the diagnosis of aortic stenosis for there are no known solutions to tackle this problem for now.
The Dr. concluded by saying the team aim to develop an algorithm-based method of indexing aortic stenosis with mitral regurgitation thereby allowing doctors to perform right diagnosis and severity grading so that a patent can be treated on time and thus increase the chance of the patient survival.
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