Talk:Collaboration:Shriner

Reviewers' comments from the 1st stage of selection were:

1. How does this extend beyond what you have already done?

2. Please discuss how this study will affect human health.

These are quite important questions. Though in my idea, this grant proposal is about a completely new technology, and the potential application in the clinical setting is almost infinite. We should, however, provide a few examples.

The impact on the study of pathophysiology in the cardiac diseases with this new technology is enormous. This space is too small to list up all such diseases or potential experiments. However, the study of pathophysiology is more about basic science, though it is difficult not to imagine that such finding from basic pathophysiology impacting heavily on clinical science.

Well, rather, if one is interested more shot-term, direct impact on clinical setting, I might have to list up a few easily-understandable example, out of so many other.

In the field of cardiac surgery, there are two famous operations; Maze Operation for atrial fibrillation, and Batista Operation for dilated myopathy. Both operation is about dissecting out some unnecessary/harmful portion of the heart either to improve the cardiac output, or to treat arrhythmia. Both operations are, however, extremely difficult and requires skill, especially in the evaluation of where to dissect. Clearly, no one wants to remove the healthy part of the heart. So, question has always been, how one can distinguish the normal portion and abnormal portion?

If one can somehow "see" the focus of arrhythmia, it becomes so much easier to determine which portion to cut out by Maze Operation, based on such information. If one can visualize which part of the left ventricle has poor contractility, has more fibrosis than other parts, or has poor shedding of blood vessels due to such fibrotic changes, it becomes easier for one to decide the dissection area.

In the experimental setting, we are already at the stage we are, on the regular basis, observing calcium waves in detail, measuring practically all the different parameters of microcirculation, movement of the myofibers, detailed morphology, cell death, autophagy, extent of NO production, ROS production, etc, all in the muscles of live mice.

Why not imagine these techniques all combined, might serve to improve those difficult cardiac surgery?

From the second stage:

Is the technology developed for too small size of motion correction for the mouse heart, and thus not suitable for application for big-sized heart in the human setting?

The simple correct answer after good amount of deliberation is, NO. This technology can very well cover the range of movement of the human heart beat, at least in the x-y dimension.