Multi-modality cardiac imaging: A case-based discussion

Dr Marina Hughes’ career has focused on non-invasive cardiac imaging. Her passion and special expertise is cardiac MRI for adults and children with congenital and inherited heart disease. She has experience in service development, management, research, specialist clinical imaging and patient care. She has published her own clinical research and has continually helped to educate junior and senior trainees.

After medical school in Western Australia, Dr Hughes completed a PhD and trained in clinical paediatrics in Oxford, UK. She then trained in paediatric cardiology and became consultant and echocardiography lead at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. After moving back to the UK in 2006, Marina worked as clinical lead for cardiac MRI at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, helping to build a leading service, scanning more than 1000 paediatric and adult patients with congenital heart disease per year.

Dr Hughes is now the clinical lead for adult congenital heart disease at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, where she is supporting an advanced imaging service for patients with congenital heart disease.

Professor Marc Dweck is the chair of clinical cardiology at the University of Edinburgh, British Heart Foundation intermediate clinical research fellow and a consultant cardiologist at the University of Edinburgh. He is a board member of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging.

Professor Dweck’s research program is centred around the use of multi-modality imaging (echocardiography, CT, CMR, PET) to improve our understanding of cardiovascular pathophysiology and ultimately to improve patient assessment, care and outcomes. In particular, it has focused on three major areas i) coronary atherosclerosis and the factors associated with plaque rupture; ii) the pathogenesis of aortic stenosis (in both the valve and myocordium) and the development of novel therapeutic strategies; and iii) cardiomyopathy.

Professor Dweck performed imaging fellowships at Mount Sinai Hospital New York (Zahi Fayad, Valentin Fuster) and Cedars Sinai Los Angeles (Dan Berman). He has published more than 240 manuscripts (H-index 43), including in the leading medical (NEJM, Lancet, JAMA) and cardiovascular journals (EHJ, JACC, Circulation). He is the recipient of numerous national and international awards (e.g. Michael Davies Early Career Award, British Cardiovascular Society; Sir Jules Thorn Award for Biomedical Research; British Heart Foundation Outstanding Investigator Award; William Parmley Prize, JACC). He is on the editorial boards of Circulation, Heart, and the European Heart Journal – Cardiovascular Imaging; is the chief investigator of two ongoing randomised controlled trials investigating novel therapeutic strategies in aortic stenosis (SALTIRE 2 NCT02132026 & EVOLVED NCT03094143); and an investigator on the SOCTHEART, SCOTHEART 2 and PREFFIR trials in coronary atherosclerosis.

Dr Giulia Benedetti graduated in medicine at San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, in 2012 with an experimental thesis on the role of magnetic resonance imaging in patients with acute myocardial infarction. She completed her training in radiology in 2018 with an experimental thesis on new CMR parameters in patients with acute myocarditis. Throughout her career, she has developed a great interest in cardiac and thoracic imaging, with a specific interest in cardiac MRI, cardiac CT and chest CT. She has also developed an interest in AI and machine learning, leading projects based on the use of radiomics. In 2016, she completed a clinical research fellowship in cardiac imaging at Barts Heart Centre.

Dr Benedetti became a cardio-thoracic consultant radiologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in 2018. She is regularly exposed to a huge variety of cardio-thoracic pathologies, through CT and CMR, including adult congenital heart disease, CT in the setting of both stable and acute chest pain, CT for lung cancer and interstitial lung disease.

Dr Benedetti has taken part in several research projects related to cardiac imaging, presented at national and international conferences and written book chapters. She regularly takes part in teaching activities, sharing her passion for imaging with radiology, cardiology and respiratory registrars and fellows. She is part of the British Society of Thoracic Imaging, the British Society of Cardiac CT, the European Society of Radiology and the European Society of Cardiac Radiology’s Young Club.