About

Elliot R. McVeigh, PhD, is the Lab Director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Lab (McVeigh Lab) at the University of California, San Diego. Before joining UCSD, he was the chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the Medical Imaging Laboratory. In 1999, McVeigh collaborated with the Laboratory of Cardiac Energetics at the National Institutes of Health to develop a research program focused on cardiovascular interventional MRI. He joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1988 immediately after earning his Ph.D. in medical biophysics from the University of Toronto, where he also completed a bachelor's degree in physics in 1984. McVeigh's work integrates bioengineering, medical imaging, and clinical collaboration, particularly with specialists in Radiology, General Cardiology, Interventional Cardiology, Electrophysiology, and heart failure, to form comprehensive research teams aimed at advancing cardiovascular imaging and intervention.

Research topics

• Internal medicine
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Mathematics
• Cardiology
• Engineering
• Demography
• Optics
• Anatomy
• Biology
• Biomedical engineering
• Physics

Selected publications

• Iodine And Vessel Wall Attenuation Of Lipid Spectral Signature In Plaque EID-DECT Phantom Imaging

  Journal of cardiovascular computed tomography · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Left atrial flow and thrombosis risk from 4D CT contrast dynamics by physics-informed neural network and indicator dilution theory

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-04-03

  articleOpen access

  Atrial fibrillation (AF) promotes blood stasis and thrombus formation, most often within the left atrial appendage (LAA), and can lead to stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA). Time-resolved contrast-enhanced computed tomography (4D CT) captures left atrial (LA) opacification and washout, but it does not directly provide quantitative stasis metrics such as blood residence time. Patient-specific computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can quantify LA/LAA residence time, yet routine clinical use is limited by computational cost and sensitivity to patient-specific boundary conditions. Here, we present two complementary approaches to infer time-resolved 3D residence time fields directly from contrast dynamics. First, a physics-informed neural network (PINN) treats contrast as a passive scalar and jointly reconstructs velocity and residence time by enforcing the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and transport equations for contrast concentration and residence time in moving, patient-specific LA anatomies. Second, an indicator dilution theory (IDT) formulation computes voxelwise, time-resolved residence time maps from contrast time curves alone by constructing a PV-referenced impulse response and modeling transport with a tank-in-series model with spatially dependent parameters. Both methods are benchmarked against patient-specific CFD in six cases spanning diverse LA function, including three patients with TIA or thrombus in the LAA and three patients free of events. Both approaches reproduce expected spatial and temporal trends, with higher residence time in the distal LAA and higher LAA residence time in cases with TIA or thrombus. IDT demonstrates the closest agreement with CFD across the full range of residence times and produces maps in seconds, facilitating clinical translation. In contrast, the PINN additionally recovers phase-dependent atrial flow structures, but tends to smooth and underestimate the highest residence-time regions and requires hours of training. Together, these results support a scalable workflow in which IDT enables rapid stasis screening from contrast CT, and PINNs provide a complementary pathway for detailed, patient-specific hemodynamic inference when full-field flow information is needed.

  PublisherDOI

• Ground Truth Accuracy And Histogram Analysis Of Lipid Rich Low-attenuation Versus Noncalcified Plaque Volume Quantification Across Different Fixed Versus Adaptive HU Thresholds - A Photon Counting Phantom Study

  Journal of cardiovascular computed tomography · 2025-07-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Reproducibility, Contrast-to-Noise Ratio And Accuracy Of Low-attenuation Plaque Volume Quantification Across The Spectrum Of Tube Voltages And Fixed Versus Adaptive HU Thresholds: Phantom Study In EID-CT

  Journal of cardiovascular computed tomography · 2025-07-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Hemodynamics affects factor XI/XII anticoagulation efficacy in patient-derived left atrial models

  Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine · 2025-04-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia that disrupts blood circulation in the left atrium (LA), causing stasis in the left atrial appendage (LAA) and increasing thromboembolic risk. In patients at sufficiently high risk, anticoagulation is indicated. This benefit may be counterbalanced by an increased risk of bleeding. Novel anticoagulants under development, such as factor XI/XII inhibitors, may be associated with a lower bleeding risk. However, their efficacy in preventing thrombosis is not fully understood. We hypothesized that patient-specific flow patterns in the LA and LAA not only influence the risk of thrombosis but also the effectiveness of anticoagulation agents. METHODS: To test our hypothesis, we simulated blood flow and the intrinsic coagulation pathway in patient-specific LA anatomies with and without factor XI/XII inhibition. We included a heterogeneous cohort of thirteen patients, some in sinus rhythm and others in AF, four of whom had an LAA thrombus or a history of transient ischemic attacks. We used computational fluid dynamics based on 4D CT imaging and a detailed 32-coagulation factor system to run 247 simulations. We analyzed baseline LA flow patterns and evaluated various factor XI/XII inhibition levels. Implementing a novel multi-fidelity coagulation modeling approach accelerated computations by two orders of magnitude, enabling many simulations to be performed. RESULTS: The simulations provided spatiotemporally resolved maps of thrombin concentration throughout the LA, showing that it peaks inside the LAA. Coagulation metrics based on peak LAA thrombin dynamics suggested patients could be classified as having no, moderate or high thromboembolic risk. High-risk patients had slower flows and higher residence times in the LAA than those with moderate thromboembolic risk, and they required stronger factor XI/XII inhibition to prevent thrombin growth. These data suggest that the anticoagulation effect was also related to the LAA hemodynamics. CONCLUSION: The methodology outlined in this study has the potential to enable personalized assessments of coagulation risk and to tailor anticoagulation therapy by analyzing flow dynamics in patient-derived LA models, representing a significant step towards advancing the application of digital twins in cardiovascular medicine.

  PublisherDOI

• Line profile edge-width half maximum analysis of mixed coronary plaque phantom by photon counting CT: impact of calcium and iodine on detection of low attenuation plaque with ground truth reference

  2025-02-14

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Reduced left atrial strain from 4-dimensional computed tomography predicts atrial fibrillation recurrence after ablation

  Heart Rhythm · 2025-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Improvement In RV Motion Tracking With Intra-cycle Motion Correction

  Journal of cardiovascular computed tomography · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Impact of ablation on regional strain from 4D computed tomography in the left atrium

  Journal of Interventional Cardiac Electrophysiology · 2025-06-19 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• New Applications of Cardiac Computed Tomography

  2025-12-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The recent improvement of Cardiac Computed Tomography technology has yielded 3D images with 1mm^3 voxels collected within 150ms. This remarkable improvement in spatial and temporal resolution has enabled new clinical applications. In this seminar we will review developments of 4D CT (3D space and 1D time) for measuring LV function and dyssynchrony, LAA blood transport, and early detection of coronary calcium.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• True 4DCT for Quantifying LV Dyssynchrony and Function for Targeting LV Lead Location in CRT

  NIH · $2.4M · 2019–2023

• NIH Grant R01HL045683

  NIH · $1.6M · 2003

• NIH Grant R29HL045683

  NIH · $581k · 1997

• NIH Grant T32EB010021

  NIH · $1.6M · 2015

Frequent coauthors

• Michael A. Guttman

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  169 shared

• Robert J. Lederman

  166 shared

• Daniel A. Herzka

  152 shared

• Cengizhan Öztürk

  Boğaziçi University

  141 shared

• Hiroshi Ashikaga

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  127 shared

• Peter Kellman

  National Heart Lung and Blood Institute

  106 shared

• Ergin Atalar

  Bilkent University

  91 shared

• J. Andrew Derbyshire

  81 shared

Labs

• Cardiovascular Imaging Lab (McVeigh Lab)PI

  Investigators and students in CViL come from diverse backgrounds. Bioengineers, Electrical, Mechanical engineers and Physicists form the technical core of the team.