Doctor's in the Heart Center at Children's are redefining what has typically been called early detection. With technologically advanced tools including echocardiography they are looking inside fetal hearts and spotting abnormalities months before babies are born.
Through fetal diagnosis, doctors can actually see the heart and valve structures and detect the most serious form of heart disease in children by 20 weeks of gestation, the mid-point in pregnancy.
In some cases, Dr. Keller turns to the embryo of a chick or a mouse to shed light on how the heart functions and how it acquires its normal structure during its earliest days. In his lab, the avian embryo is an experimental model capable of being modified to allow for the study of specific heart conditions.
For example, hypoplastic left heart syndrome is created by simply tying a small suture around the developing atrium, which alters how blood flows into the heart and reduces the flow on the left side. "If blood flow is reduced to the left side of the heart, the structures on that side of the heart will not grow and the embryo will have hypoplastic left heart syndrome exactly as we see it in patients," said Dr. Keller, chief of cardiology at Children's. "We can then identify the changes in structure and function associated with this condition and determine if we can reverse this condition by fetal intervention."
To get even more from such models, Children's is participating in the development of new high-resolution imaging systems that allows scientists to peer inside the embryonic heart when it is a small as 2 millimeteres, measure blood flow, and visualize heart fun
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Contact: Melanie Finnigan
Melanie.Finnigan@chp.edu
412-692-5502
Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
5-Apr-2005