present

Improving Cardiac Safety from Drug Toxicity using Signal Processing

Richard Frank Kerr, Ph.D.

iCardiac Technologies

Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Location: The Laboratory for Laser Energetics Auditorium - 240 East River Road, Rochester, NY 14623

Time: 6:30-7pm Pizza and Socializing, 7pm-8pm Technical Presentation

SPS Announcements + Venue Map:

http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/rochester/sp/location.html

RSVP: Andy Gallagher (andrew.gallagher@kodak.com) for pizza count

Abstract

The human heart is a complex muscle group that is susceptible to electrical signal path disruption resulting from the unintended effects of some drugs on the cardiac system. The electrical output from the cardiac system may be depicted as a composite signal waveform, referred to as an electrocardiogram (ECG), containing the superposition of sequenced depolarization and repolarization operations as specific areas of the heart muscle contracts and then relaxes. The aggregate of this muscle motion constitutes the heart beat. The disruptive effect of drugs on the cardiac system can manifest as a prolongation of the time interval between the sequenced muscular operations, and thus prove deadly for a segment of the population susceptible to dangerous heart arrhythmias. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is acutely aware of this problem and has enacted regulations for cardiac drug safety monitoring that the pharmaceutical industry must follow to bring a drug to market. For the past 30 years the University of Rochester Heart Research Follow-up Program has been researching congenital prolongation and more recently they have investigated acquired prolongation due to drugs. One outcome of their research is a computer program named COMPAS, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the cardiac repolarization signal, in addition to supporting advanced cardiac biomarkers and statistical tools. In 2006 COMPAS was exclusively licensed to iCardiac Technologies. In addition to providing COMPAS for testing the safety of new drugs during clinical trials, iCardiac is pioneering technology to evaluate on a per-person basis the personal cardiac safety of drugs which are known to induce arrhythmias in a small segment of the population. This endeavor will enable the acceptance and distribution of drugs which might otherwise be terminated during the clinical trial or withdrawn after release if the drug is considered to pose a cardiac risk for a small percentage of the overall population. The signal processing incorporated into COMPAS, along with the future direction of cardiac safety signal processing research at iCardiac, will be discussed.

Speaker Biography

Richard Frank Kerr, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist at iCardiac Technologies. His role at iCardiac involves the research and development of novel cardiac biomarkers and the verification of the COMPAS software signal processing algorithms. Prior to joining iCardiac, he was a Systems Engineer and a Senior Development Engineer in the Health Group of the Eastman Kodak Company for 20 years. He served as the Systems Engineer for Kodak’s family of DirectView Digital Radiography X-ray products, and a Senior Development Engineer for their Computed Radiography and medical laser film printer products. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 2003 with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. In addition, he has earned two independent Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering, whose respective areas of concentration were signal processing (University of Rochester) and computer engineering (SUNY at Buffalo). His Ph.D. research concentrated on medical ultrasound signal processing using Heterodyned Spatial Quadrature (HSQ) to estimate blood flow velocity in multiple dimensions. The distinguishing feature of the HSQ technique comes from its ability to estimate the velocity of the transverse blood flow component at a Doppler angle of 90 degrees to the sound beam axis, where traditional flow estimation techniques fail.