#7
In the nation by U.S. News &
World Report
Pediatric pulmonologists Emily DeBoer,
MD, and Jordana Hoppe, MD, along
$13M+
with biomedical mathmetician Jennifer
Mueller, PhD, get a patient set up for
electrical impedance tomography, a
In research grant funding
novel imaging technique for the lungs.
PULMONOLOGY
Current
Imaging
An inverse problem
As of now, there’s
no standard form
of imaging for both
the structure and
function of the lungs.
A CT scan can tell you, say, if a patient with cystic fibrosis might have air trapping, and where. But it also
exposes the patient to about two years of background radiation, and it can’t tell you anything about airflow
or capacity. Spirometry can do that, but it can’t tell you much about blockage. And if the patient is younger
than about 6, it can’t tell you much of anything, at least not accurately.
“You could do pulmonary MRI, but that’s a lot of equipment, people and computing power, and it’s
expensive,” says Emily DeBoer, MD, a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado specializing
in biomarkers of lung disease. “Most centers don’t do it. And most kids under 6 still can’t tolerate sitting
still that long.”
“We get worried about doing frequent CTs on younger children,” says pediatric pulmonologist Jordana
Hoppe, MD. “But we need way to get information to tell us how we’re doing treating kids with cystic
fibrosis. Are they getting better? Is this or that treatment making a difference? There aren’t a lot of options
to understand lung disease in the preschool-age range.”
That’s about to change.
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Different tissues conduct electricity differently. Blood is a great
conductor. Bone, not so much. Air-infused lung tissue, even less.
“As current flows through tissues, it takes the path of least
resistance,” says Jennifer Mueller, PhD, Professor of Mathematics
and Biomedical Engineering at Colorado State University. “The idea
is that we can measure that and use that data to map what’s inside
the body.”
As an idea, electrical impedance tomography, or EIT, has been around
for a long time. Electrical engineer John G. Webster first detailed it in
1978. Computer scientists and medical physicists produced the first
working cross-section of a human forearm in 1983. Now, Dr. Mueller
is collaborating with Dr. DeBoer and others at Children’s Colorado to
develop that technology for the clinical space.
“The way it works is that you have these measurements and you’re
trying to figure out what causes them, to find the cause of an effect,”
says Dr. Mueller. “That’s called inverse problem. And it’s a difficult one.”
The problem is basically this: You place a set of electrodes around
a certain circumference — say a 3-year-old’s chest. You know a few
things. You know the measurements of the chest. You know how
much current is going into that space and where it’s coming from, how
much and where it’s coming out on the other side. You know some
approximate values: lungs, heart, ribs, spine.
30
Pediatric pulmonary and
sleep physicians
4,000
Pediatric sleep studies
annually
LEADERSHIP:
Robin Deterding, MD
Chief, Pediatric Pulmonary
Medicine,
Ed and Roxanne Fie
Anderson Family Endowed
Chair for Breathing
For pulmonology
healthcare professional
resources, visit
childrenscolorado.org/
BreathingHCP.
NEW CONSTELLATIONS
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