Dr. Teresa Tsang

Dr. Tsang is a cardiologist, Director of Echocardiography at Vancouver General Hospital and UBC Hospital, and Professor of Medicine,  Associate Head of Research for the Department of Medicine. In January 2017, Dr. Tsang was appointed Co-Acting Head for UBC Department of Medicine.

Dr. Tsang completed medical school at the University of Alberta and proceeded to Internal Medicine and Cardiology Fellowships at the U of A.  During her cardiology fellowship she was awarded both Medical Research Council of Canada and Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research awards, under which she studied Clinical Epidemiology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.  After a year as staff cardiologist at Vernon Jubilee Hospital in B.C., Dr. Tsang began a Fellowship in Echocardiography at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.   She was subsequently offered a staff position in Cardiology at Mayo Clinic, where she worked for more than 10 years as a clinician and researcher.   During this period, she was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine, and Consultant in Cardiology (2002), and subsequently Professor of Medicine (2006).  

Current Research Focus

Dr. Tsang’s research program is principally focused on physiologic and pathophysiologic aging of the cardiovascular system, and the prediction and prevention of adverse age-related cardiovascular events, including atrial fibrillation heart failure, stroke, and cognitive dysfunction. Her team has been investigating the use of advanced echocardiographic techniques to detect changes in the structure or function of individual heart chambers, and how these changes are associated with future development of disease.

Example Project(s)

“INformation FUSion for Echocardiography (INFUSE): A Novel Platform for Automatic Analysis of Echocardiography Data at Any Point-Of-Care” Heart disease remains a leading cause of illness, disability, and premature death for Canadians. One of the primary medical imaging technologies for diagnosing, monitoring, and managing various forms of heart disease is echocardiography (echo) or cardiac ultrasound. Echo is non-invasive and essentially risk free, enabling physicians to use it in all types of patients. This valuable imaging capability however, is often available only in larger urban areas and regional health care centres, as specially trained technicians (sonographers) are needed to perform an echo exam to acquire the specific images physicians need for clinical decision-making. Further, even where echo is available, the high demand for this imaging technology has led to unacceptably long wait times in some regions, due in part to a shortage of expert sonographers. In this proposal, we aim to develop and apply "information intelligence," a rapidly growing data analytics technique, to echo imaging. This technique would allow accurate and reliable measurements from echo that is relatively independent of the sonographer's experience. Development of this information intelligence platform would improve access to echo, decreasing the disparity in terms of availability and access between rural or isolated regions of the country and larger cities, as well as reducing wait time in urban centres.

Research Keywords

Cardiology, Data Fusion, Echocardiography, Feature Extraction, Image Classification, Image Registration, Image Segmentation, Machine Learning, Quality Assurance, Ultrasound