Dr. John Wood graduated in from UC. Davis (Electrical Engineering) in 1984 and received his MD/PhD (Bioengineering) from the University of Michigan in 1994. He performed his residency and fellowship in Pediatric Cardiology at Yale and joined Children’s Hospital Los Angeles/USC Keck School of Medicine in 1999. Dr. Wood is the director of cardiovascular MRI and specializes in the MRI assessment of congenital heart disease as well as noninvasive assessment of iron burden by MRI.
Dr. Wood has been studying the cardiovascular consequences of hemoglobinopathies for almost a decade. He is one of the pioneer’s of MRI-based cardiac and liver iron measurements but is also studying oral chelation strategies in animals and humans. He was the principle investigator for the NIH-sponsored Early Detection of Iron Cardiomyopathy Trial whose goal is to identify earlier markers of cardiac dysfunction. Dr. Wood also has funded projects examining pancreatic and pituitary iron burden by MRI and their functional correlates. Recently, Dr. Wood received a ARRA Challenge grant to study the role of iron overload in sickle cell vasculopathy.
Abstract: Novel aspects of imaging in sickle cell disease
Noninvasive imaging has undergone a transformation over the past ten years. Instead of just visualizing anatomic differences, imaging is been used to characterize complex physiologic processes, including metabolic signatures, tissue oxygenation, iron concentration, vascular reactivity, neurologic connections, and protein expression. This talk will outline a number of these novel applications, including the use of MRI, optics, ultrasound, and computed tomography, focusing on new imaging approaches in sickle cell disease.