Federal Project Grant Award Summary

Massachusetts General Hospital's Research Management Division received $186,840 in federal funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) under the Cardiovascular Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.837) for a project titled "Advanced Analysis of High-Resolution Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Images." The award was obligated on July 3, 2026, with a completion date of June 30, 2031. The research deliverables focus on advancing diffusion tensor MRI (DTI) imaging techniques and analysis methodologies for the myocardium, specifically through development of an inner-volume focused acquisition approach centered on the intraventricular septum that reduces image artifacts and increases spatial resolution approximately tenfold compared to conventional methods.

The core products include development and validation of DTI phenomapping—a novel voxel-level analysis approach that generates subject and population matrices of 10 DTI-derived parameters per voxel, analyzed using principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering techniques. The research aims to establish microstructural phenotypes of healthy myocardium and disease states such as aortic stenosis, addressing signal-to-noise constraints through specialized 64-channel cardiac coil technology. This work represents a paradigm shift from traditional segment-or-patient-level DTI analysis to granular, voxel-by-voxel quantification, enabling detailed characterization of myocardial microstructural organization in both healthy and pathological conditions.