Dr. Matthew Bramlet Director
Advanced Imaging and Modeling
University of Illinois

My clinical training is specialized in children with congenital heart disease which focuses on complex hemodynamic relationships of anatomy and physiology related to the human circulatory system.  I served as medical director of the congenital echocardiography lab from 2010 to 2015.  Additionally, I am certified in Advanced Pediatric Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging and I hold the position of Director of the Children’s Hospital of Illinois Congenital Cardiac MRI program since 2009.  I developed a state of the art congenital cardiac MRI program which ultimately led to research collaborative agreement with GE Healthcare.  With a focus on 3D SSFP high quality imaging sequences, we combined resources with Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center (JTSEC) www.jumpsimulation.org to pioneer anatomically accurate 3D congenital cardiac models resulting in improved surgical planning through improved complex anatomic understanding.  My expertise in this area led to a collaboration with the NIH’s 3D Print Exchange as curator of the site’s Heart Library, http://3dprint.nih.gov/collections/heart-library, a nationwide collaborative effort to improve the education and understanding of congenital cardiac anatomy through an open source initiative to build a comprehensive library of congenital cardiac 3D digital models.  The task of creating a library of 3 dimensional high quality content requires reinvention of the library process as methods of peer review pertaining to 3D content have to be created along with quality and method guidelines.  While initial strategies are culminated through consensus statements among clinical experts, the importance of centralizing the methods and content into an open source database will allow for collaboration and accelerated iterative development.   I have documented this effort in detail in a book chapter co-authored with Dr. Meghan Coakley, Program Lead, Global Strategic Initiatives; Product Manager, The NIH 3D Print Exchange, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch, Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology; book chapter: Utility of a 3D File Database to Rapid Prototyping in Cardiac Disease: 3D Printing the Heart (Kanwal Farooqi, editor); submitted.  The focus needed to innovate in the blank space of 3D modeling in medicine transformed my focus into an 80% research role as Lead Investigator of Advanced Imaging and Modeling through JTSEC.  The clinical background of advanced cardiac MRI image acquisition combined with the technical expertise of transcribing 3D image data sets into digital 3D models is foundational for simulation projects involving the hemodynamics of anatomically curated data.