Corrigan Minehan Heart Center
Massachusetts General Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) Registry
CLIPI-BUL161
Boston,
MA
02114
Phone: 617-726-0423
Researchers at Mass General led the first optical coherence tomography (OCT) registry, an international database of 3,000 patients who received OCT. OCT is an intravascular imaging technique that may help physicians identify patients who are at increased risk for future heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.
To build the MGH OCT registry, we partnered with prominent institutions internationally. Using information gathered from the registry, it is our goal to provide knowledge that will help doctors improve their understanding of coronary atherosclerosis.
By creating extremely high-resolution images from within the artery, OCT can pinpoint the microscopic characteristics of plaque, as opposed to intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), which is more widely used, but has a lower resolution. Currently OCT is the only intravascular imaging technique with the resolution sufficient enough (approximately 10 µm) to delineate fine structures, such as thin fibrous caps and to characterize plaque types, such as lipid rich plaque. OCT can also detect subtle structural changes after PCI, such as plaque disruption including tissue prolapse and protrusion after stenting with high accuracy.
The MGH Coronary OCT Research Laboratory is a pioneer in the use of optical coherence tomography to view coronary arteries at an unprecedented level. Over the past two decades, we have led the way in using this technology by:
Dr. IK Jang’s laboratory has an extensive publication record which is available here.
The Mass General Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) Registry is led by a team of world class researchers who have devoted their careers to pioneering OCT imaging. Meet the team behind the OCT registry, including:
Ik-Kyung Jang, MD, PhD is the Allan and Gill Gray Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the MGH Coronary OCT Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Jang came to Massachusetts General Hospital in 1987 from Leuven University in Belgium, where he completed his residency in medicine and fellowship in cardiology. He also successfully defended his doctorate thesis at the same university. After his advanced fellowship in cardiology at Mass General, he joined the staff working as a physician and interventional cardiologist in the Cardiology Division. He continues to work as a cardiologist at MGH today.
His research interest has been acute coronary syndromes including acute myocardial infarction. His earlier research focused on pharmacology and physiology of thrombosis and thrombolysis including thrombin hypothesis and platelet inhibition. For the past twenty-four years he has pioneered the application of intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) in patients to better characterize coronary plaques and to understand the mechanisms of plaque rupture. Dr. Jang was the first to perform an intravascular OCT procedure in a patient. In addition, he was the principal investigator for multiple US multicenter OCT trials. Dr. Jang has been invited to give lectures at numerous national and international meetings and has an extensive publications list. He received national recognition as the 2022 recipient of the Distinguished Scientist Award-Clinical Domain from the American College of Cardiology.
Hang Lee, PhD, is the study statistician of the OCT Registry. Dr. Lee is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and has experience in a wide range of collaborative research. At MGH, he is Associate Director for the Harvard Catalyst Biostatistics Program at Mass General and Associate Director of Collaborative Research and Consulting at the Mass General Biostatistics Center. He also serves as the statistical editor for the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography (JASE). His statistical expertise is in longitudinal data, statistical genetics, clinical trials design and complex data analysis, and he has authored and co-authored over 350 clinical study articles.
Kyungsang Kim is an Assistant Professor of Radiology. He earned his PhD from KAIST in 2014. His research centers on artificial intelligence (AI) models for medical data, with a focus on integrating these AI solutions into clinical workflows to enhance quality assurance and diagnostic accuracy. Dr. Kim’s current work leverages large multimodal models (LMMs) to address unmet clinical needs by combining visual and textual medical data for improved decision support and patient care.
Iris McNulty received a BA in Anthropology from Brown University and a BSN from Simmons College. She worked at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1995-2013, with a focus on Cardiology from 2000-2013, and as a clinical research nurse 2003-2013. She has significant experience working on OCT clinical trials and worked with Dr. Jang during the inception of the MGH OCT Registry. In June of 2019 Iris returned to MGH to work with Dr. Jang as the MGH Coronary OCT Lab Manager.
Daichi Fujimoto, MD, PhD, came from Kobe, Japan. He graduated from Kobe University School of Medicine in 2013 and obtained his PhD from Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine in 2022. He worked as a cardiology physician in Japan while conducting research at Saiseikai Nakatsu Hospital and Kobe University Hospital. He is currently focusing on calcification.
Marco Covani, MD, is a Cardiology Resident from University Hospital of Parma (Italy). He graduated from University of Messina (Italy) in 2021. After that he moved to Parma to attend his Cardiology Residency where he is training as an Interventional Cardiologist and engaged in various research project. He joined Dr. Jang’s laboratory to conduct research focused on defining high-risk-plaque characteristics and plaque burden using multi-modality imaging techniques.
Dr. Riccardo Scalamera is a cardiology resident at the University of Genoa, where he also earned his medical degree in 2021. His clinical and research interests are primarily focused on interventional cardiology, and he has been actively involved in several research projects within this field.
He is currently working in Dr. Jang’s laboratory, where his research focuses on the study of high-risk coronary plaques by applying artificial intelligence to both invasive (OCT) and non-invasive (CTA) imaging techniques."
Dr. Stefano Andreaggi graduated in Medicine from the University of Padova (Italy) and completed his cardiology training at the University of Verona (Italy). In 2024 he joined the Academic Multimodality Interventional and Imaging Centre (AMIIC) at the John Radcliffe Hospital, University of Oxford (UK) as a Visiting Fellow, where he was involved in research activities related to intracoronary imaging. His current research in Dr. Jang's Laboratory focuses on the study of plaque erosion using deep learning models.
Sekeun Kim, PhD, is a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He obtained his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Yonsei University, South Korea, in 2022. His research focuses on integrating artificial intelligence with cardiology, particularly in the application of AI techniques to medical image analysis.
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