Biomarkers for early diagnosis and treatment monitoring in pulmonary hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a severe disorder of the pulmonary vasculature, which can lead to right heart failure, resulting in death. PH is most often due to left heart disease or chronic respiratory disease and there are currently no drugs indicated for its treatment. Thus, this project aims to carry out basic and clinical research aimed at identifying new markers, signals and possible therapeutic targets for PH, with the ultimate goal of contributing to alleviate and cure the disease, as well as to have a set of easy tools for the differential diagnosis of this pathology. During this project, Vicomtech has developed and implemented new experimental models of PH, establishing advanced imaging techniques based on deep learning to optimally assess the functional state of the pulmonary vasculature and identifying imaging biomarkers to characterise the disease. To this end, tools have been developed for the segmentation of cardiac ventricles and pulmonary artery from magnetic resonance imaging, allowing automatic quantification of biomarkers from cardiac images, such as systolic volume, ventricular volume throughout the cardiac cycle or ejection fraction. A user interface has also been generated to integrate the above solutions, thus facilitating the study of differences between healthy and diseased subjects based on magnetic resonance imaging.