The principal focus of my research is the molecular imaging of processes involved in myocardial injury and repair. The incidence of heart failure has increased dramatically in the last decade underscoring the importance of this work. Current areas of focus include the imaging of cardiomyocyte apoptosis, the imaging of myocardial inflammation in both acute and chronic injury models, and the imaging of stem cell therapy in infarcted myocardium. We have shown recently that cardiomyocyte apoptosis can be imaged in-vivo, by MRI, in the rapidly beating heart of a live mouse. To the best of our knowledge, this has been the first successful demonstration of targeted molecular imaging, by MRI, in the myocardium in-vivo.

Our approach is a multimodality one and we employ MRI, optical (fluorescence and bioluminescence) and nuclear imaging techniques to shed light on biological problems in the heart. However, given the unsurpassed ability of MRI to phenotype the myocardium, most if not all of our studies involve a large component of MR imaging. While our work is always highly "biologically driven", a significant technical effort also exists to develop novel imaging techniques for improved cardiac and vascular molecular imaging by MRI.