Challenges and Opportunities in Cardiovascular Health Informatics

Cardiovascular health informatics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field concerning the processing, integration/interpretation, storage, transmission, acquisition, and retrieval of information from cardiovascular systems for the early detection, early prediction, early prevention, early diagnosis, and early treatment of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Based on the first author´s presentation at the first IEEE Life Sciences Grand Challenges Conference, held on October 4-5, 2012, at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, USA, this paper, focusing on coronary arteriosclerotic disease, will discuss three significant challenges of cardiovascular health informatics, including: 1) to invent unobtrusive and wearable multiparameter sensors with higher sensitivity for the real-time monitoring of physiological states; 2) to develop fast multimodal imaging technologies with higher resolution for the quantification and better understanding of structure, function, metabolism of cardiovascular systems at the different levels; and 3) to develop novel multiscale information fusion models and strategies with higher accuracy for the personalized predication of the CVDs. At the end of this paper, a summary is given to suggest open discussions on these three and more challenges that face the scientific community in this field in the future.