Blood clots like the one that lodged in tennis star Serena Williams’ lung last week, sending her to the hospital, kill more than 100,000 people a year and is a focus of research by ASU’s imaging informatics group.
The imaging informatics group, a division of the Biomedical Informatics Department, is hoping to develop a system to improve the evaluation of medical images used to determine if there is a clot in the blood vessels that feed the lungs.
The medical name for blood clots like Serena Williams’ is a pulmonary embolism, or PE.
In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution making March the official Blood Clot Awareness Month in memory of NBC journalist David Bloom, who died from PE while reporting in Iraq.
In a 2008 public health report, the U.S. Surgeon General stated that many cases of PE are preventable and issued a call to action not only to health professionals, but to the public at large to create a greater awareness of PE and reduce the number of people it kills each year.
Nancy Baumhover, a clinical assistant professor at the College of Nursing and Health Innovation, said there are factors that add to the risk of having a pulmonary embolism.
“There are definitely compounding factors that would place someone at higher risk, some of which would be inactivity, birth-control pills, smoking and … a sedentary life,” Baumhover said.
Other factors, according to the Phoenix St. Joseph’s Hospital website, are genetic conditions; surgery or trauma to the legs; situations in which mobility is limited, like flying for long distances; obesity and cigarette smoking.
ASU’s Biomedical Informatics Department estimates that PE is the third most common cause of death in the U.S.
Associate professor Jianming Liang in the Biomedical Informatics Department wants to change that statistic by improving the evaluation of medical images used to detect PE.
Liang specializes in imaging informatics, an emerging area of biomedical informatics. It combines the technologies of medical imaging, such as CT scans, with computer analysis to improve medical decision-making and reduce clinical errors. These errors can cause additional suffering and possibly death.
Many false-positives and false-negatives exist in the evaluation of medical images of the lungs, Liang said. Too often, false-positives and false-negatives can, respectively, lead to unnecessary surgery or failure to act promptly.
Liang added the system he is developing would not replace doctors trained in evaluating medical images, like radiologists, but instead provide them with a tool to evaluate a greater number of images more accurately.
Liang and the entire biomedical informatics department is planning to relocate to the Mayo Clinic’s Scottsdale campus by the end of summer.
Being closer to clinicians and patients will help the imaging informatics group to refine the medical imaging technology and ultimately deliver improved patient care, Liang said.
Reach the reporter at cbleone@asu.edu
