Dreams can come true

The first pediatric cardiologist I met after Dr. Anthony Chang, was Dr. Charitha Reddy at Stanford Children’s Hospital. Listen to our conversation at the Pediatric Moonshot podcast. When I met her, Charitha had a dream of creating CHAMBER (Children’s Hospital Aggregate Medical dataBase for Echo Research), the 1st pediatric non-invasive imaging collaborative. In her original slide deck she wrote:

Echocardiography is at the center of pediatric cardiology, serving as the front line for diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression and treatment success. Multiple studies and learning collaboratives have shown that when institutions are able to pool their patient populations, the data invariably becomes more powerful and applicable than single-center studies. However, multi-site clinical research involving echocardiographic imaging is challenging due to obstacles surrounding data transfer/storage, varying quality across institutions, and patient privacy.

Machine learning is making rapid advancements in adult echocardiography, however, these strategies have neither been widely adopted, nor do they include pediatric or fetal patients, largely due to a lack of adequate sample sizes. Currently, a major obstacle in the field is that there is no existing infrastructure to seamlessly and securely share echocardiographic imaging data among pediatric institutions; this makes it difficult to conduct robust and meaningful traditional echocardiography research, and nearly impossible to incorporate novel machine learning strategies

It’s taken a while for us to implement Charitha’s dream, but we’re almost there. Dreams can come true.