CardioExchange Archive

Goodbye flat images. Hello holography. Sometime in the not-too-far-distant future cardiologists may work with projected 3D holograms of the heart instead of images on a flat screen. And this is just the beginning of a technology-driven transformation of cardiology.

That’s the vision of Mount Sinai’s Partho Sengupta, who delivered a widely praised technology-gone-wild lecture at the annual meeting of the American Society of Echocardiography last month. The Feigenbaum lecture featured holograms of projected 3D digital images and animation to demonstrate, according to a Mt. Sinai press release, “the latest technology and future applications of functional echocardiography to more precisely analyze the structure, function and flow patterns of the cardiovascular system.”

Sengupta’s talk even featured an interactive discussion between Sengupta and a holographic projection of his mentor, James Seward, the retired former director of echocardiography at the Mayo Clinic. The conversation with Seward brought to mind Princess Leia’s holographic plea for help from Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.

After the talk, Harvey Feigenbaum, the founder of ASE and widely known as “the father of echocardiography,” said:  “All I can say is wow! I already feel sorry for next year’s Feigenbaum lecturer. There’s no way he can top this…. We just got a glimpse of the future.”

Patricia Pellikka, a past President of ASE and the current director of the echocardiography lab at Mayo, said that the “holographic presentation at ASE was absolutely spectacular! He presented an insightful and futuristic lecture about the massive amounts of data available with echocardiography and how this information should be managed and harnessed to improve patient care.”

In an interview, Sengupta said that the hologram is only the most visible and dramatic of the “disruptive trends” that will result from the exponential growth of technology. “Everything is coming together as a cluster. It’s not just a hologram. The whole field is moving, which includes advanced data visualization technology, advanced data analytics, and the ability to do things in the cloud,” he said. He also discussed the impact of robotics and wearable computers, citing one example of a paramedic in the field wearing Google glasses and receiving advice from a remotely based physician about a trauma or cardiac arrest case.

Click here to watch the entire lecture on YouTube.