The International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging - Meet the Editors

Section Echocardiography

Sheila Hegde, MD, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA

Section Cardiovascular MRI

Assistant Professor Yin Ge, MD, FACC, St Michael’s Hospital and University of Toronto, Canada

Section Cardiovascular CT

Alexander van Rosendael, MD, PhD, Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands 

Dr Alexander van Rosendael, MD, PhD. His research focuses on non-invasive imaging of coronary artery disease especially with coronary CT. He received his PhD cum laude for research performed at the Leiden University Medical Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Weill Cornell Medicine, Dalio Institute for Cardiovascular Imaging in New York, USA. He has worked on numerous international cardiac CT trials and registered and his active endeavours or on artificial intelligence aided automated coronary plaque imaging.

Section Nuclear Cardiovascular Imaging

Professor Thomas H. Schindler, MD, PhD, FACC, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Thomas Hellmut Schindler, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Radiology and Medicine at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Consultant in Medicine, and Director of imaging fellowship, PET/CT program. In addition, he serves as adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Between 02/2013-12/2017, Dr. Schindler was Director of Nuclear Cardiovascular Medicine and Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Schindler has an international reputation in the field of Cardiovascular Imaging with focus on cardiovascular PET/CT imaging. He received his medical degree (1995) and doctor medecinae, (1996) from the University of Leipzig, Germany ("magna cum laude"). He is board certified for Internal Medicine, Cardiology and Nuclear Cardiology. From 2002 to 2006, Thomas Schindler completed an NIH-sponsored postdoctoral fellowship in cardiac PET imaging at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (Mentor Dr. Heinrich R. Schelbert, MD, PhD). Subsequently, from 2006-2013, Thomas Schindler had joined the faculty of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), initially as assistant professor and clinical attending primarily in charge for Cardiovascular Imaging but also for General Clinical Cardiology, while being promoted to "Privat-Docent" in 2009 and Deputy Head Physician in Cardiology 2010.
He has authored over 182 peer review publications with an impact factor exceeding 1085 mainly as first and senior author, and numerous book chapters. He has been member of BOD of the SNMMI, EANM, and ESC for several years and he is involved in numerous conferences as organizer and invited speaker. Thomas Schindler research work has made major contributions in the identification and characterization of coronary circulatory dysfunction, cardiac sarcoidosis, and myocardial receptor imaging by means of PET. He received the SNMMI 2020 Presidential Distinguished Educator Award and the 2018 Cardiovascular Council Hermann Blumgart Award, the 2015 Reviewer of the Year Award of the Eur Heart J, and 2011-2012, 2023 Elite Reviewer Awards of the ACC Journals.

Section Multimodality Imaging

PD Dominik C. Benz, MD, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland  

Dr. Dominik Benz is an Attending Physician at the Department of Cardiology as well as Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital Zurich and a Senior Lecturer in Cardiology at the University of Zurich. He completed his training in cardiology and cardiovascular imaging at the University Hospital Zurich and a post-graduate fellowship in cardiac amyloidosis at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Benz’s research focuses on the use of multimodality imaging in cardiac amyloidosis as well as quantification of myocardial blood flow in cardiac PET and is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and Swiss Heart Foundation. He is a member of the ESC Board for Young Cardiovascular Professionals, of the ASNC Leadership Development Program and of the ASNC Health Policy Committee. Dr. Benz is HIT ambassador for the EACVI and on the editorial board for EHJ-IMP.

Lorenz Räber, MD PhD, born 1979, is an Extraordinary Professor of Cardiology and Faculty member at Bern University Hospital and serves as Catheterization Laboratory Director at the Cardiology Department at Bern University Hospital since 2015. His is a clinical scientist with research interest in intracoronary imaging, coronary artery disease, heart brain interactions. 

Section Coronary Artery Disease / Ischemic Heart Disease

Marco Guglielmo, MD, FEACVI, FSCCT, University Medical Center Utrecht and Haga Teaching Hospital, Den Haag, The Netherlands

Dr. Marco Guglielmo is a multimodality cardiac imager, skilled in clinical cardiology and imaging techniques including transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, and cardiac computed tomography. Since January 2022, Dr. Guglielmo has been working as an Imaging Cardiologist in the Netherlands, at both the University Medical Center in Utrecht and the Haga Teaching Hospital in Den Haag. Prior to this, Dr. Guglielmo worked for several years in the Cardiovascular Imaging Department and in the Clinical Cardiology Unit at the Centro Cardiologico Monzino IRCCS, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Parallel to his intense clinical activity, Dr. Guglielmo has been deeply involved in research activities, having authored or co-authored more than 150 papers across various fields of cardiovascular imaging, which have been published in international peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, he is the author of three chapters of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) handbook. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. at Utrecht University in the application of Advanced Cardiac Imaging to Electrophysiology. 
Dr. Guglielmo holds EACVI accreditation in transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography, cardiovascular MR imaging (level 3), and cardiac CT (level 3). He also serves as a member of the EACVI Certification and Accreditation Committee, specifically in the section of Cardiac CT. He is a Fellow of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (FEACVI) and a Fellow of the Society of Cardiovascular CT (FSCCT). Furthermore, Dr. Guglielmo is the past Chairman of the CT&Nuclear Working Group of the Italian Society of Cardiology (SIC).

Section Coronary Artery Disease / Ischemic Heart Disease

Edoardo Conte, MD, FESC, FEACVI, Ospedale Galeazzi-Sant’Ambrogio IRCCS, Milan, Italy

Dr. Edoardo Conte acquired a solid academic and clinical background in the field of cardiovascular imaging with a special interest to non-invasive evaluation of coronary atherosclerosis, sport cardiology and myocardial/pericardial disease. He works as a clinical cardiology at Galeazzi-Sant’Ambrogio Hospital IRCCS in Milan since 2022 following several years of work dedicated to advanced cardiovascular imaging at Centro Cardiologico Monzino IRCCS in Milan. He successfully obtained EACVI Certification in Transthoracic Echocardiography, Cardiac CT and Cardiac MRI. He is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (FESC) and a member of the Myocardial and Pericardial Disease Working Group of the European Society of Cardiology. He is Deputy Editor of the EHJ-Case Report and Associate Editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Computer Tomography. He was among the co-authors of more than 180 research paper (all published on indexed journal with impact factor).

Section Cardiomyopathies

Professor Simon Greulich, MD, University of Tübingen, Germany

Section Cardiomyopathies

Assistant Professor Alberto Cipriani, MD, University of Padova, Italy

Alberto Cipriani is Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Padua – Italy. He earned the Medicine and Surgery degree and post graduation degree in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Padua, Italy. In 2018 he joined the Working Group Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (Charité Medical Faculty- Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine - HELIOS Klinikum Berlin Buch, Germany), to learn and do research in the field of cardiac MRI. Since 2019, he works as a cardiologist in the University Hospital of Padua and as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Padua, in the Department of Cardio-Thoraco-Vascular Sciences and Public Health. His research interests are focused on diagnosis and therapy of patients with cardiac amyloidosis, SCD risk stratification of genetic cardomyopathies, and application of cardiac MRI in diagnosis and prognosis of cardiomyopathies.

Section Structural Heart Disease

Assistant Professor Borek Foldyna, MD, FSCCT, Harvard Medical School Boston, USA

Dr. Borek Foldyna, MD, is a Cardiovascular Radiologist, Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, and Fellow of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography. He also serves as the Administrative Director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA. Dr. Foldyna completed his medical training at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and received specialized training in Radiology and cardiovascular imaging. Moreover, he obtained additional training in applied biostatistics from the Harvard Catalyst Education Program.
Besides clinical utilization of cardiac imaging, Dr. Foldyna is the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on several NIH/NHLBI- and industry-funded research efforts. His research interests focus on clinical and imaging aspects of atherosclerotic and structural heart disease. He is particularly interested in exploring inflammation and immune activation as key pathophysiological factors of atherosclerosis. Dr. Foldyna is known for his extensive work analyzing large data sets from major imaging studies, including the Framingham Heart Study, PROMISE, and REPRIEVE. In collaboration with Harvard's Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Program, Dr. Foldyna has developed machine-learning approaches to assess the prognostic value of established and novel coronary artery disease and vascular inflammation imaging markers. Dr. Foldyna has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and has received multiple research awards for his work on coronary artery calcium and plaque imaging.

Section Arrhythmia

Anna Giulia Pavon, MD, Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale Lugano, Switzerland

Dr. Anna Giulia Pavon is a consultant cardiologist in the Cardiovascular Imaging Laboratory of Istituto Cardiocentro Ticino, Lugano Switzerland since July 2021.  Dr. Pavon graduated in Medicine at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan (2012), Italy where she also completed the residency program in Cardiovascular Disease (2018) .  Dr. Pavon has a Master in Biostatistics for Medical Research at University of Padova (2019) and she is a post-graduate student in Healthcare Management at Università della Svizzera Italiana. Skilled in multimodality imaging (trasthoracic and 3D transesophageal echocardiography, cardiac CT and cardiac MRI)  she worked as research fellow in Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance in the "Centre pour la Résonance Magnétique Cardiaque '' in Lausanne (Switzerland) under the supervision of Prof. J. Schwitter (2018). From 2019 to 2021 Dr. Pavon served as consultant cardiologist in the Cardiology Department of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudoise, Lausanne, Switzerland, where she actively collaborated with the "Centre pour l'Imagerie Biomedicale" (Prof. M. Stuber).  Skilled in clinical research, her main research focuses are on multimodality imaging in valvular heart disease and ischemic heart disease, cardiac MRI and imaging in cardiac implanted electronic devices. Since 2019 she is member of the Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance and since 2023 she is part of the "Heart Imagers of Tomorrow" of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging.
She has published several papers on cardiovascular imaging in high rank journals and participated as speakers in national and international meetings.

Section Vascular Imaging

Sasan Partovi, MD, FNASCI, FSVM, Cleveland Clinic, USA

Sasan Partovi, MD, is a staff physician in Interventional Radiology at Cleveland Clinic Main Campus in Cleveland, Ohio, and is board-certified by The American Board of Radiology for Interventional Radiology/Diagnostic Radiology. Dr. Partovi received his medical degree from the University of Heidelberg Medical Faculty in Germany. After medical school, Dr. Partovi completed a one-year research fellowship in Imaging Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. He completed his internal medicine internship and radiology residency at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, before completing his vascular and interventional radiology clinical fellowship at The Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.
He has been an Editorial Board Member of The International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging since 2016. Dr. Partovi was recently named Fellow of The North American Society of Cardiovascular Imaging (FNASCI) and Fellow of The Society of Vascular Medicine (FSCVM). Dr. Partovi is a member of the Vascular Imaging Expert Panel of The American College of Radiology. In 2021, he was elected into the leadership of the Interventional Intraoperative Community of The American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine to serve a six-year term, and he is currently vice chair of the Community.
Dr. Sasan Partovi is the author of over 195 PubMed-listed peer-reviewed manuscripts and numerous scientific abstracts and books. He has served as invited faculty and grand round speaker and he has given invited lectures at major medical centers and meetings in the United States and abroad. In his clinical practice at Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Partovi specializes in complex endovascular interventions for end-stage renal disease patients as well as advanced invasive and non-invasive vascular imaging.

Section Artificial Intelligence / Radiomics

Isaac Shiri, PhD, University Hospital Bern, Switzerland

Dr. Shiri is the Group Leader of Artificial Intelligence in Cardiovascular Imaging at Bern University Hospital, Bern, Switzerland. He received his PhD from the University of Geneva, where he focused on developing multimodal artificial intelligence-based models for medical applications. Currently, he heads the Artificial Intelligence in Cardiovascular Imaging Laboratory (AI-CVIL) within the Cardiac Imaging Department at Bern University Hospital. The AI-CVIL dedicates its research to artificial intelligence, particularly to pioneering machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) applications in cardiovascular disease. Its aim is to address a wide spectrum of health-related issues by analyzing multimodal information, utilizing diverse datasets that include text, signals, medical images from various modalities (such as CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, IVUS, and OCT), videos, electronic health records (EHRs), and omics data.

Section Basic / Translational Science

Professor Christopher T. Nguyen, PhD, FSCMR, FACC, Cleveland Clinic, USA

Christopher Nguyen, PhD is Director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Research Center, and Director of MRI Research in the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. He is a biomedical engineer by training and focuses on developing and clinically translating novel technologies and innovations into the clinic. Dr. Nguyen was named to the Cleveland Clinic staff in 2022 having been recruited from Massachusetts General Hospital where he held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017-2022). Previously he was faculty at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (2016-2017). Dr. Nguyen completed postdoctoral fellowships in biomedical imaging at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard Medical School. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from University of California Los Angeles following his undergraduate degree in Bioengineering from University of California Berkeley.  Dr. Nguyen currently is the Principal Investigator (PI) on multiple National Institutes of Health-funded studies on developing novel cardiovascular techniques and evaluating treatments of heart failure. Dr. Nguyen has co-authored more than 80 scientific papers and editorials in peer-reviewed medical and engineering journals including Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Robotics, Circulation, and JACC. Dr. Nguyen has been an invited lecturer at numerous international and national medical meetings and conferences. He is also serves as the Cardiovascular Table Chair of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Annual Meeting Program Committee. Dr. Nguyen is also a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. He sits on various counsels of the American Heart Association and National Institutes of Health. He is a frequent peer reviewer for multiple medical journals including the Nature, Science, Advanced Materials, the American Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Circulation, Circulation Research, JACC, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. He is also serves as an Associate Editor of Frontiers Cardiovascular Medicine and International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging.

Section Data Science

PD Georgios Siontis, MD, PhD, University Hospital Bern, Switzerland

Dr. Siontis is a senior attending physician in the Department of Cardiology, University Hospital of Bern. Dr. Siontis has a longstanding interest in evidence based synthesis, clinical epidemiology, and analysis of high dimensional data. His current research focus is mainly on evidence synthesis of high-risk interventions for different cardiovascular conditions, the role of advanced cardiovascular imaging in appropriate risk stratification of individuals at risk, and the application of alternative methods for safety monitoring in clinical practice.

Section Editorial / Cases / Images

Professor Nico R.L. Van de Veire, MD, PhD, FESC, FEACVI, AZ Maria Middelares Gent and Free University Brussels, Belgium

Nico Van de Veire graduated as an MD from Ghent University (Belgium) in 2000. He trained as a cardiologist at the University Hospital in Ghent and became a board certified cardiologist in 2008. During his training he was given a grant from the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders to perform clinical research. This resulted in a PhD at Ghent University in 2006 (Non invasive evaluation of patients with heart failure and coronary artery disease). In 2008 and 2009 he worked as a non-invasive cardiologist in Leiden University Medical Center, NL. As of 2010 he works a a staff member at the Cardiology Department of AZ Maria Middelares Ghent Belgium and he was also appointed a visiting professor at the Free University Brussels. He was appointed Fellow of both the ESC and the EACVI. His main interests are cardiac imaging, valvular disease, heart failure and cardio-oncology. He is an Editor of Acta Cardiologica, The International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging and Editorial Board Member of European Heart Journal and active EAVCI member. Participation in numerous (inter)national cardiologic symposia. (co)Authorship of 100 plus abstracts and papers in national and international journals and bookchapters.

Social Media Editor

Shehab Anwer, MD, MBBCh, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland

Currently based in Zurich, Shehab Anwer, MBBCh, MD Cardiology, holds the position of a postdoctoral fellow in the echocardiography lab at the University Heart Center Zurich and serves as a REDCap Manager at the Aswan Heart Center, Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation. Born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1987, his academic journey includes a bachelor's degree from Ain Shams University and training in cardiology and advanced echocardiography at the Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation in Aswan, Egypt, which has provided a foundation for his interest in, and focus on, cardiovascular imaging and diseases. Shehab has a strong background in data science, including data lifecycle management, data analytics and machine learning. He is also actively engaged in social media management for the Department of Cardiology at the University Heart Center Zurich and the Swiss Society of Cardiology, as well as European Heart Journal – Imaging Methods and Practice, and the International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging. He has received notable awards including the best abstract award in Valvular Heart Disease from the Swiss Society of Cardiology in 2022 on behalf of the team at University Heart Center Zurich about myocardial work and outcome after transcatheter aortic valve implantation, and the Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award from the American Heart Association in 2023 as part of the Aswan Heart Center team for their Ballana Heart Study preliminary data. Shehab has several publications focusing on the study of myocardial deformation using echocardiography in the fields of cardiomyopathies and valvular heart disease, with specific interest in the atrium. His diverse interests include digital painting, photography, aviation, architecture, and Egyptology, maintaining a rich array of interests and skills that he describes himself as a wayfarer across art, technology, and cardiology.

Senior Advisory Editor

Professor Raymond Y. Kwong, MD, MPH, FACC, FSCMR, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA

Dr. Kwong is the Director of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) Imaging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  Dr. Kwong completed his medical training at University of Toronto, Canada in 1992, then residency in Internal Medicine at University of British Columbia, and fellowship in cardiovascular diseases at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, DC.  He then pursued a 2-year fellowship in clinical CMR imaging at the Laboratory of Cardiac Energetics at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 2001, Dr. Kwong joined the faculty of the Cardiovascular Division of BWH focusing on clinical applications of CMR for patient care.   Dr. Kwong’s research focuses on noninvasive myocardial tissue characterization and its clinical impact, spanning across ischemic and non-ischemic cardiomyopathies.  He has participated in committee positions within the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR), and as a permanent study member of NIH study sections.   Dr. Kwong has served on the Editorial Boards of Circulation, Circulation Cardiovascular Imaging, Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), JACC Imaging, and the Journal for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (JCMR).  Dr. Kwong has authored more than 270 original peer-review papers, review articles or book chapters, most of them focused on the technical advancement or clinical applications of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging.   Dr. Kwong’s current research focused on the clinical utility and prognostic implication of CMR to patients with coronary artery disease and various cardiomyopathy.  Under his supervision, the CMR laboratory current serves as the imaging core laboratory for several NIH-funded international clinical trials of novel cardiac therapies.