Sándor J. Kovács Jr., Ph.D., M.D.

DEPARTMENT OF Internal Medicine
Keywords: cardiovascular physiology, mathematical modeling, biophysics, imaging, cardiology

Cardiovascular physiologic signals (pressures, flow, velocities, volumes) and static and/or dynamic images (echo, cath, MRI, CT) contain a wealth of information about the physical, biological and material attributes of the system. Only a minute amount of the total information in these signals is utilized for characterization of the presence and severity of disease, and essentially none of the information is used to gain a deeper understanding of the basic principles by which the components work as a system, or how the physiology and pathophysiology can be quantitatively characterized in terms of basic causal laws that can be expressed mathematically.

The Cardiovascular Biophysics Laboratory research group pursues a multi-disciplinary program encompassing selected aspects of physiology, biophysics, engineering, physics and clinical medicine. The overall goal is to solve basic and applied problems in physiology and medicine using a multidisciplinary approach, to discover “new” physiology, and to advance the frontiers of diagnosis and therapy. Areas of interest include: theoretical biology and physiology, characterization of the kinematic and material properties of cardiovascular tissue and its relation to matrix biology, 4-chamber heart function, diastolic function, ventriculo-arterial impedance, maximization of information extraction from physiologic signals, mathematical modeling of cardiovascular function and its in-vivo verification, and development of new technology for imaging and physiologic signal acquisition and processing.