About the Echo Core Lab
The Echo Core Laboratory provides high-quality echocardiographic measurements to support clinical investigations and trials in which echo is used for determining patient eligibility or evaluating study end points, or both.
Our lab is supported by advanced technology and a dedicated leadership team committed to delivering exceptional quality assurance.
Facilities and equipment
Our lab has dedicated workspace featuring secure storage and direct access to Mayo Clinic's clinical Echocardiography Laboratory.
Our workstations and technical capabilities include:
- Digisonics DigiView workstations.
- GE EchoPac for strain imaging.
- Epsilon EchoInsight workstations for strain imaging.
- Tomtec workstation for 3D imaging.
All digital images received are archived and securely stored on protected servers.
History
The Echo Core Lab was established in 1999 by Jae K. Oh, M.D., and his colleagues at Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minnesota.
In 2001, the lab was invited by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to provide an independent, third-party expert review for the high-profile Vieques Heart Study of residents of Vieques, Puerto Rico. This study investigated the incidence of vibroacoustic disease, specifically, the impact of noise and vibrations from naval exercises on pericardial thickness. Our lab's analysis concluded that there was no evidence of clinically significant pericardial thickening among the island's population.
Since publication of the Vieques Heart Study results, our lab has expanded collaborations with both federally sponsored and industry-sponsored research partners, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Marfan Foundation.
Our notable milestones include serving 126 clinical centers across 22 countries for the Surgical Treatment for Ischemic Cardiomyopathy With Heart Failure (STICH) trial, which included the largest number of participating centers for a single study to date. Our lab also reviewed 15,000 echocardiographic studies for the Medtronic CoreValve trials in transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), the highest volume of echoes evaluated in a single trial.
Leadership
Director: Jae K. Oh, M.D., is director of the Echo Core Lab. Dr. Oh is a cardiologist and an echocardiographer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He is the Samsung Professor of Cardiovascular Diseases at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and has authored hundreds of publications on echocardiography and cardiology. He also serves as director of the Pericardial Disease Clinic and the Integrated Cardiac Imaging Center within the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases.
Co-director: The co-director is Jared G. Bird, M.D., a cardiologist and echocardiographer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
Manager: The Echo Core Lab manager is Jennifer A. Warmsbecker, R.D.C.S., a registered diagnostic cardiac sonographer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.