Funded by a $20 million gift from the Dalio Foundation, the institute will combine research, clinical care, and education to uncover new answers about preventing heart disease

NEW YORK - To help reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease, the nation's leading killer, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College have created the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging. Raymond T. Dalio, a life trustee of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, has made a gift of $20 million through his Dalio Foundation in support of the institute.

The Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging will employ a multidisciplinary, multimodality approach to the detection and treatment of heart disease, with a focus on finding new answers about prevention of heart disease in at-risk individuals and ultimately save lives. Its mission is to innovate, integrate, and educate, goals that will be achieved through cutting-edge research, transformations of current clinical paradigms, and dissemination of knowledge.

Dr. James K. Min, an expert in cardiovascular imaging and a physician-scientist who has led several large-scale multicenter clinical trials, has been appointed director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging. Dr. Min is an attending physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and a full-time faculty member in the Department of Radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. He joins NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was director of cardiac imaging research and co-director of cardiac imaging.

Rooted in the central role of imaging techniques to better diagnose cardiovascular disease, the institute will not only use state-of-the-art tools such as MRI, CT, and PET scanners, but will also focus on the development of novel next-generation technologies and diagnostic tests. Applying a team-based approach that draws on the expertise of physicians and scientists in radiology, cardiology, genetics, proteomics, and computational biology, the institute's primary research initiative is to identify the "vulnerable plaque," or the specific coronary artery lesion that is responsible for a future heart attack or sudden cardiac death.

"The vulnerable plaque is the holy grail in the diagnostic work-up of individuals with suspected coronary artery disease, and its elusive nature has precluded the timely treatment of millions of high-risk individuals," says Dr. Min. "We will apply an array of innovative hardware and software imaging technologies to improve identification of the vulnerable plaque, and then seek to apply these findings in large-scale multicenter clinical trials and registries to encourage full integration of our research findings into clinical practice."

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