2015 AWARDED GRANT

Richard J. Czosek, MD

Automated ECG Screening for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH
Richard J. Czosek, MD – $28,200

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes, and has an estimated prevalence of 1:500 in the population. Proper diagnosis and treatment can prevent the vast majority of sudden cardiac events in patients with HCM. Unfortunately, many HCM patients have no clinical symptoms or early warning signs that allow for early diagnosis and treatment. Screening for HCM in the general population of young adolescents has been prohibitive in the United States secondary to cost and the inability of current screening methods to identify patients with adequate sensitivity while minimizing the amount of healthy patients inadvertently screened as having HCM. This research study is aimed at developing an automated screening tool for identification of patients with HCM. Using electrocardiograms from patients with known HCM, this project will develop a computerized algorithm designed specifically to detect the changes seen in patients with HCM. This screening tool can then be refined to identify the highest percentage of patients with disease while attempting to limit misclassification of healthy patients leading to unnecessary family stress and additional cost burden to the medical system. It is expected that an automated tool to screen for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy will reduce extraneous costs and maximize the number of young individuals that can be screened. Through reductions in resource utilization, it is possible to bring down the cost of population based screening, and it may allow for universal screening of all young individuals. By allowing cost effective screening, more at risk adolescents and young adults can be identified and associated sudden death events can be prevented.