Asthma is a leading cause of hospital visits and admissions in Canada, leading to enormous costs to patients, employers and the health-care system. But Dr. Sarah Svenningsen’s research has shown that asthma measurements − and potentially treatments − can be dramatically improved by harnessing the power of medical imaging and computer programs.
For many patients with asthma, current therapies do not improve their symptoms or lower the risk of the disease worsening. These therapies are mainly directed towards improvements in breathing or lung-function tests that are poor markers of how patients feel and how frequently they need to change or increase their medications. Dr. Svenningsen has developed new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods and measurements that may be used to personalize or guide treatment selection in individual asthmatics.
Dr. Svenningsen, whose work won her a 2017 Polanyi Award, believes that improved asthma measurements will lead to treatments that are more effective and less burdensome on patients and their healthcare providers. For example, she is investigating the potential for MRI to improve the delivery of treatment following bronchial thermoplasty, a treatment option in some severe cases, which uses radiofrequency energy to reduce the smooth muscle that causes airways to close in asthma. It normally requires three treatment sessions delivered over several weeks to cover the whole lung, but using Dr. Svenningsen’s approach, doctors may be able to target treatment to only those airways that are diseased, greatly reducing the number of treatments, costs and patient burden.
Dr. Svenningsen’s vision is that medical imaging will lead to the delivery of the correct treatment, in the most effective way, for the right patient, at the right time.
