Rick Bogle summarized the animal rights view of Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni who was appointed yesterday as the new head of the National Institute of Health. “Dog vivisector named to head NIH,” Bogle headlined his e-mail to an animal rights mailing list, complete with a few citations to Zerhouni’s publications. Zerhouni’s fascinating work gives a prime opportunity for animal welfare activists to highlight the important work being done by researchers with dogs and other animals.
Zerhouni specializes in radiology and has spent the last decade working on techniques that will revolutionize the field. What Zerhouni does mostly with dogs is give them MRIs.
The MRI is, of course, an incredibly useful diagnostic tool, but it does have its limitations. Take, for example, myocardial infarction (MI) — commonly referred to as a heart attack.
During a heart attack, blood flow to muscles cells in the heart is inadequate and the cells die. In almost all heart attacks, decline in blood flow is caused by a closing of the blood supply from the coronary artery.
Researchers used to think that heart attacks only occurred when there was severe blockage of the coronary artery, but it turns out that even very minor blockages in the coronary artery can cause a heart attack. Unfortunately measuring how much blood is flowing through the heart is still a rather difficult procedure. Obtaining accurate results currently involves a two-day regiment of tests that is very expensive.
Zerhouni and his colleagues are working on a technique that couples the MRI with sophisticated computer analysis and that replace that two-day, expensive test with a one-hour, relatively cheap enhanced MRI that produces a full three dimensional view of the heart and blood flow.
This would revolutionize treatment and, almost as important, prevention of heart attacks. As Zerhouni said in a John Hopkins press release a few years ago,
I would like to develop a one-stop shop approach to cardiac disease that will revolutionize cardiac testing. If we can make proactive screening for heart diseases cheap and rapid enough with radiology, then, combined with genetic techniques, we could identify individuals most likely to get cardiac disease.
So where do the dogs come into play? Dogs’ cardiovascular system is very similar to the human respiratory system, making dogs a popular animal model for cardiovascular research (dogs were instrumental in the development of open-heart surgery, stent implantation procedures, heart transplants and other cardiovascular innovations).
Zerhouni uses dogs in his research to refine and improve the computer algorithms that he uses to post-process the data from the MRI. Researchers can plug in new algorithms and quickly find out how accurate or inaccurate they are and in this way build a better system much faster than could ever be accomplished with human beings.
Source:
Zerhouni appointed chairman of Hopkins radiology. John Hopkins Medical Institute, February 7, 1996.
Dog vivisector named to head NIH. Rick Bogle, E-mail, March 26, 2002.