About the Echo Core Lab

The Echocardiography Core Lab provides echocardiography measurements for clinical investigations and trials that use echocardiography for patient eligibility or study endpoints, or both.

Our Echo Core Lab is backed by state-of-the-art facilities and a leadership team dedicated to achieving unparalleled quality assurance.

Facilities and equipment

Our lab has 400 square feet of dedicated space, with secure storage facilities and access to the resources of the 40,000-square-foot clinical Echocardiography Laboratory at Mayo Clinic.

Workstations and capabilities in the Echo Core Lab include:

  • Digisonics Digiview workstations
  • EchoPac (GE, strain imaging)
  • Epsilon EchoInsight workstations (strain imaging)
  • Tomtec workstation (3D imaging)

Digital images we receive are archived and stored on a secure server.

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 Echo Core Lab was invited by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to provide independent, third-party expert review for the prominent Vieques Heart Study, which was investigating the incidence of vibroacoustic disease — the effects on pericardial thickness of noise and vibrations caused by naval exercises — in the people of Puerto Rico. The Echo Core Lab review concluded that there was no evidence of clinically significant pericardial thickening in the island residents.

Since publication of the Vieques Heart Study results, the Echo Core Lab has grown its partnerships with both federally sponsored and industry-sponsored investigators, including the National Institutes of Health and the Marfan Foundation.

The largest number of clinical centers the Echo Core Lab has worked with to date for one trial was for the STICH trial, with 126 participating centers from 22 countries. The largest number of echoes reviewed for a single trial was 15,000 studies from transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) for the Medtronic CoreValve trials.

Leadership

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 the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and has authored hundreds of publications on echocardiography and cardiology. He also serves as director of both the Pericardial Disease Clinic and the Integrated Cardiac Imaging Center within the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases.

The Echo Core Lab manager is Jennifer A. Warmsbecker, R.D.C.S., a registered diagnostic cardiac sonographer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.