This year the Jos Willems young investigator award will be contested by 4 rising stars in the field of computerized electrocardiology during the upcoming ISCE (International Society for Computerized Electrocardiology) conference in Indian Wells (USA). And 2 out of 4 finalists are coached and guided by Peter van Dam, ECG Excellence Chief Science Officer. Both Iris and Manon deliver their excellent work on the UMCU supervised by our Peter and Dr. Peter Loh. The focus of the research by Iris van der Schaaf and Manon Kloosterman is of course on applying CineECG and other inverse modelling techniques for detecting abnormalities in heart activation and tracking heart disease progress with these technologies. Their work is also supported by the Dutch Heart Foundation Hartstichting and Eureka Network for which we are grateful.
Naturally we hope one of these two ladies will win the award, which is named after Prof Jos Willems who died far to early at the age of 55 in 1994 and is remembered since by this award.
Jos Willems was a great contributor to Computerized Electrocardiology development
Dr. Willems was a Fellow of the the American College of Cardiology and the European Society of Cardiology, and head of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University Hospital of Leuven, Belgium.
Dr. Willems directed the large European project entitled Common Standards for Quantitative Electrocardiography—or CSE for short—completed in December 1990 and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 1991. The CSE database is now required reading for the US Food and Drug Administration. By working on the CSE database Jos Willems contributed significantly to the development and standardization of computerized cardiac modelling and his legacy is still used today (e.g. the CSE databases are used as quality references by the FDA and ISO norms).
But we also wish good luck to the other 2 finalists: Robert Herman MD, who is both active as a researcher on applying AI in ECG analysis and also the co-founder of Powerful Medical (offering PMCardio which is a great tool using AI for arrythmia detection) and Sydney Rooney of UPMC delivering great work on identification of Atrial Fibrillation.
The finalists of the Jos Willems young investigator award will present their work on the evening of March 31 during the conference and the verdict is planned for the next evening during the closing dinner.
