Andrew F. Laine, Ph.D.

Andrew Laine was elected chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Columbia University, effective July 1, 2012. He is the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology at Columbia.

Heart disease is the nation’s leading cause of death. About 80 million Americans suffer from at least one form of cardiovascular disease, and each year about 900,000 people die from it.

To understand stages of this disease, Andrew Laine and his team are analyzing real-time video 3-D ultrasounds of the heart. Ultrasound echoes are high-frequency sound waves that bounce off tissues and can be converted into sonograms.

“Recent advances in real-time 3-D ultrasound (RT3-D or 4-D) imaging give us a wealth of dynamic information captured in seconds over the entire cardiac cycle,” said Laine.

“With the proper analytic tools it can provide a novel and clinically effective 3-D strain-and-torsion measuring tool that will allow cardiologists to routinely measure cardiac wall motion and strain with reliable accuracy.”