James K. Min, MD, an expert in non-invasive cardiac imaging, has joined the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute as Director of Cardiac Imaging Research and Co-Director of Cardiac Imaging.
Min comes to Cedars-Sinai from the Weill Cornell Medical College and the New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where he served as the Director of Cardiac Computed Tomography.
Min is widely regarded as a preeminent scholar and clinician focused on cardiac imaging, having served as the principal investigator in several multicenter trials and having authored more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed academic medical journals. Min is the current president of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography. At Cedars-Sinai, Min also has a joint appointment in the Department of Imaging and the Department of Biomedical Sciences in the Biomedical Research Imaging Institute.
"The addition of Dr. Min to the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute faculty is an exciting development for the future of cardiology," said Eduardo Marban, MD, PhD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and the Mark S. Siegel Family Professor. "As medical technology advances, physician-scientists like Dr. Min are key to creating and maximizing treatment options for leading-edge patient care."
Said Daniel S. Berman, MD, chief of Cardiac Imaging at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and the S. Mark Taper Foundation Imaging Center, "Dr. Min's expertise in multimodality imaging and coronary CT angiography in particular will seamlessly complement the ongoing research at Cedars-Sinai and will undoubtedly contribute significantly to advancing the field of cardiovascular imaging."
Long recognized as a national leader, the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute has been growing rapidly over recent years. In the 1990s, Berman's team developed imaging software used worldwide for non-invasive detection of heart function and blood flow and research by P.K Shah, MD uncovered a mutant gene that provides protection against atherosclerosis, which can lead to clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes. After Marbán, former chief of cardiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, joined Cedars-Sinai in 2007, the addition of cardiac electrophysiology expert Sumeet S. Chugh, MD, hypertension specialist Ronald Victor, MD and advanced heart disease and transplantation medicine specialist Jon Kobashigawa, MD, rounded out the Institute's senior leadership. Under the direction of C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, the institute's Women's Heart Center has helped uncover gender differences in heart disease. In the area of Interventional Cardiology, directed by Raj Makkar, MD, Cedars-Sinai physicians have completed more minimally-invasive heart valve repair and replacement procedures than any other medical center.
In 2009, Marbán and his team completed the first procedure in which a patient's own heart tissue was used to grow specialized heart stem cells that were then injected back into the patient's heart in an effort to repair and re-grow healthy muscle in a heart that had been injured by a heart attack.
In 2010, doctors at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute performed more adult heart transplants than any other medical center.
Source: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center