CardioWise Stretch Quantifier for Endocardial Engraved Zones (SQuEEZ) Receives Patents from Both the United States and the European Union
CardioWise, Inc., is pleased to announce two significant patents protecting its heart function analysis software, Stretch Quantifier for Endocardial Engraved Zones (SQuEEZ). The European Union Patent Number 12839978.9 was awarded on February 2, 2019, followed closely by the U.S. Patent on June 7, 2019 (patent application number 14/350,991). Both patents are entitled “Methods for Evaluating Regional Cardiac Function and Dyssynchrony from a Dynamic Imaging Modality using Endocardial Motion,” and were awarded to The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) for its pioneering work on a mathematical software algorithm that utilizes cardiac Computed Tomography (CT) data to determine the regional contractile function of the heart muscle at high resolution. The research and development of SQuEEZ was completed by co-inventors, Dr. Elliot R. McVeigh and Dr. Amir Pourmorteza, who worked with their team at JHU sponsored by R01 research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. McVeigh is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego and was formerly Chair of Biomedical Engineering at JHU. Dr. McVeigh is the co-Director of the Center for Translational Imaging and has a 30- year history of research in medical imaging, particularly cardiovascular CT and MRI. Dr. Amir Pourmorteza, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Pourmorteza is a biomedical engineer and CT physicist specializing in cardiovascular imaging, spectral computed tomography, tomographic reconstruction, and artificial intelligence in medical imaging. He obtained his PhD in Biomedical Engineering and completed a Fellowship in Tomographic Reconstruction from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland where he was the co-inventor of SQuEEZ with Dr. McVeigh.
They and their team developed and validated clinical applications for the patented technology in eight peer-reviewed, scientific publications.
The patent is based on the ability in sequential high resolution to track points on the endocardium as they move during the contraction of the heart to allow quantitative assessment of regional myocardial heart wall motion. The analysis of four dimensional SQuEEZ parameters has the potential to improve the ability to quantify accurately the regional myocardial contractile function (ability of the heart to pump blood) through the heart muscle of the left ventricle. The key aspect of the invention is that the individual patient strain data are compared regionally within the left ventricle of the heart to a “normal” patient SQuEEZ database that was compiled by the inventors. Using this database information, each patient-specific SQuEEZ value at each of the points can be related to the normal data range within the normal patient database.