The growth and destabilization of high-risk atherosclerotic lesions is the root cause of the leading diseases that affect society today – myocardial infarction (heart attack) and cerebrovascular accidents (stroke). Until recently the genesis and evolution of these lesions could only be followed histologically and post-mortem. Today modern imaging increasingly provides in-life visualization of pathologies of the vessel wall and the circulatory system and is the primary means of early identification of patients at high risk of cardiovascular events. In addition, innovations in imaging technology, machine learning and data analysis, coupled with advanced computerized methods can change clinical practice and help establish a rapid, accurate, and reliable diagnosis of cardiovascular syndromes.
Lambros Athanasiou was born in Ioannina, Greece, 1985, and attended at the Universities of Aegean (Information and Communication Engineering) and Ioannina (PhD in Medical Image Processing and Machine Learning). In 2015 he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and moved to Boston, USA. Today he is a researcher at MIT and Canon Medical Systems USA. His research is focused on medical image processing, machine learning and medical expert systems with an emphasis in cardiovascular engineering.
