On Friday 19 June 2026 at 14:00, Jacob Hartmann Søby defends his PhD dissertation entitled “Myocardial Perfusion Imaging and Non-Invasive Assessment of Coronary Physiology: Validation, Quantification, and Clinical Implications”. 

Coronary artery disease is one of the most common conditions in Denmark, and advanced cardiac imaging plays an increasingly important role in its evaluation. A new PhD project from Aarhus University, Health, has investigated how modern non-invasive methods for assessing myocardial perfusion can best be applied and interpreted in clinical practice.

Coronary artery disease accounts for a large proportion of hospital admissions in Denmark each year. In patients with chronic coronary syndrome (stable coronary artery disease), it is essential to determine whether symptoms are caused by reduced blood supply to the heart muscle and whether medical treatment is adequate. Advanced cardiac imaging techniques, including cardiac CT and PET scans, now allow measurement of myocardial blood flow without invasive procedures.

In his PhD project, Jacob Hartmann Søby has investigated four important aspects of these methods. First, he demonstrated that the registry of myocardial perfusion imaging procedures in Western Denmark is well-documented and reliable for research purposes. Second, he showed that two widely used PET tracers (Rubidium-82 and radioactive water) produce systematically different measurements of myocardial blood flow, even when corrections are applied. This means that the clinical thresholds used to guide decision-making cannot be used interchangeably across the two methods. Third, he evaluated a fast, locally available, deep learning algorithm for estimating pressure reduction across a coronary stenosis from cardiac CT, and demonstrated that it improved functional assessment of stenoses, but only partially reflected actual myocardial blood flow. Finally, the use of medical treatment before advanced cardiac imaging in clinical practice was examined.

Together, these findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how modern non-invasive cardiac imaging methods should be applied and interpreted in the clinical evaluation of patients with coronary artery disease.

The summary is written by the PhD student.

The defence is public and takes place in Aula, Gødstrup Hospital. Please see the press release for more information. 

Contact

PhD student Jacob Hartmann Søby
Mail: jasoeb@rm.dk 
Phone: +45 61659131

Read full press release