Dana Peters, PhD

Dana C. Peters is Professor in Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale and responsible for body and cardiac MR at the Magnetic Resonance Research Center, with a secondary appointment in Biomedical Engineering.

Early training and discoveries: She received her undergraduate degree in Physics at the Johns Hopkins University, her PhD in Physics at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she first demonstrated the utility of undersampled radial imaging. Her postdoc was at NIH, NHLBI, working in the laboratory of cardiac energetics. Following this, she was Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, working at the BIDMC Cardiac MR Center. Her expertise is in cardiovascular MR, obtained during the last decade, working with cardiologists to improve detection of heart disease. This work has led to new frontiers in the application of MRI to electrophysiology, by demonstrating that scar can be visualized in the left atrium, due to RF ablation, or due to structural remodeling pre-ablation.

Recent focus: Continuing in these directions, the cardiac MR group develops new MRI tools for evaluating cardiac function, strain, flow, pressure, and tissue characterizations, with research to investigate the arrhythmic substrate in the left atrium in patients with atrial fibrillation, or who are likely to develop atrial fibrillation. One focus of research is on diastolic dysfunction (i.e. high pressures in the heart) that both correlates atrial fibrosis and remodeling on one hand, and possibly results in atrial arrhythmia. Based on this, a new direction is to evaluate and characterize heart chamber pressures based on functional metrics, including strain, MRI-derived E/e', and flow metrics. Her group has also worked to develop new MRI methods to characterize liver cancer, and is currently working on new methods for deuterium metabolic imaging, also applied to cancer imaging.

Mentoring: Peters is also committed to training a new generation of biomedical imaging scientists. She believes in providing an environment with excellent MRI resources, knowledge about state-of-the-art methods, and important questions in collaboration with clinicians and scientists, to generate creative new solutions in medical imaging.