When is a heart attack not a heart attack? Current diagnostic tools are surprisingly inaccurate. 2020 Cade Prize finalist Dr. Russell Medford and his team have developed a “virtual cardiac catheterization” that takes existing CAT scan images and analyzes them using advanced mathematics and computational fluid dynamics. Heart doctors can quickly run this analysis on a desktop and determine whether someone has a blockage and how serious it is. This could eliminate up to 1.5 million unnecessary invasive procedures annually in the United States and Europe.  

 

TRANSCRIPT:

 

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and they're inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:37

When is a heart attack, not a heart attack, and how do we know? Welcome to Radio Cade, I'm your host Richard Miles. Today my guest is Dr. Russell Medford, CEO of Covanos, a company that is working on solutions to the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac and vascular disease. Dr. Medford is also a finalist for the 2020 Cade Prize for Innovation. Congratulations and welcome to Radio Cade Russell .

Dr. Russell Medford: 1:00

Thank you, Richard. It's a pleasure being here.

Richard Miles: 1:02

So I should note from the beginning that you are one of our first Cade Prize finalists from outside the state of Florida, specifically from Emory University in Atlanta, and now normally Floridians don't congratulate Georgians for anything, but today is a new day. So Russell, tell us a little bit about yourself. You're originally from Brooklyn. How did you end up in Georgia?

Dr. Russell Medford: 1:21

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your show Richard and we at Covanos are honored to be a Cade Fibonacci finalist . We understand this is the first year that the award is now outside of Florida and I'll speak for many Georgians, if not all, that we view our Floridian brothers and sisters with a great deal of affection and we're part of a Southeast region that has a great deal to be proud of in many areas. So we love Florida. I love Florida. My background, I'm a Brooklyn born son of Brooklyn, but was raised in Northern New Jersey, went to Cornell University for my undergraduate training and then to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, in New York City for both my medical degree training and I also have a PhD in molecular and cellular biology. I then traveled as a professional student as one to do, to Harvard and became a resident in medicine and a fellow in cardiology. And my first faculty position at the Harvard hospitals, the Beth Israel and the Brigham and Women's hospitals. My career has been characterized by basic science research on the basis for heart disease and vascular diseases and was recruited in 1989 from Boston to head up the molecular cardiology group at Emory University School of Medicine in 1989, where we began to apply new fields in our understanding of genes and molecular biology to the treatment and understanding of heart disease and other vascular diseases such as stroke. In the course of that work, I became introduced to the process by which we take ideas in the laboratory, as a basic scientist, and translate those ideas eventually into therapies that we, as doctors can use at the bedside to treat patients