The Candidate: Dr. Cesar Santana, as a fully committed individual to a career as an academic investigator, is an ideal candidate for a NHLBI award for Minority Faculty (K01). He is an imaging scientist who is well-trained in nuclear cardiology, specifically in the quantification of myocardial perfusion, function, and metabolism. He has been very productive in these areas as evidence by his publications including 4 first authored research papers published recently. Following the completion of this additional mentored research and training program, Dr. Santana will be positioned for a successful career as an independent NIH-funded investigator. The Mentors: The sponsor, Dr. Ernest Garcia, and co-sponsor, Dr. Marcelo Di Carli, are widely recognized experts in the area of quantification of nuclear cardiology studies and myocardial PET imaging. Other important collaborators include Drs. Faber, Krawczynska, Halkar, and Vaccarino. Further, both the sponsor and the team of collaborators have an extensive history of successfully training developing investigators and of NIH-funded research. The Environment: Dr. Santana is both a faculty member and member of the medical imaging development center, a large computer laboratory with access to the latest technologies including PET, microPET, MRI and SPECT imaging. Dr. Santana also has assigned to him two computer workstations that reside in his private office. He also has access and intends to use the graduate program at Emory University School of Medicine, the School of Public Health, the combined Bioengineering program at Emory and Georgia Tech and the cardiac database at Emory. A comprehensive 50-year Career Development Plan will provide the candidate with the multi-disciplinary skills required to be a highly productive independent investigator in cardiac imaging of myocardial perfusion, metabolism and function. This plan has been carefully devised to satisfy career development needs in the following major advances areas: 1) PET imaging science, 2) quantification of cardiac imagery, 3) biostatistics and epidemiological methods and 4) designing and writing research grants. The Research: The long-term objective of the project is to improve the prognostic stratification of patients with severe left ventricular (LV) dysfunction. This will be accomplished by the development of new quantitative methods for the assessment of myocardial viability. The principal method to be developed uses the simultaneous assessment of myocardial metabolism and function by ECG- gated FDG PET. The central hypothesis being tested is that in patients with severe LV dysfunction, ECG-gated FDG PET imaging alone or in conjunction with myocardial perfusion imaging can determine the degree of regional and global myocardial dysfunction, the magnitude of metabolic activity within dysfunctional areas, and the amount of myocardium at risk. These quantitative parameters of myocardial perfusion and metabolism together with the incremental value of global and regional function should provide a more complete assessment of myocardial viability and thus better prognostic power.
