According to statistics from the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2013, getting a heart attack is the second common cause of death in South Korea. However, on July 26, 2014, Yoo Hongki,a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has succeeded in developing a medical technique which enables an early diagnosis of sudden death by detecting unexpected heart attacks using molecular imaging. Yoo and a number of other professors executed this research in corporation with researchers from other acclaimed scientific institutions including Korea University Guro Hospital and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
    Sudden heart attacks, the most common cause of sudden deaths, is often caused by inner inflammations that block the arteries, stopping the blood flow to the rest of the body. Yoo explained how his technology plays a part in detecting the disease. “One of the exterior symptoms of blocked arteries is shallow tissues around the artery, while the interior one is active inflammation. The new technology allows both of them to be scrutinized simultaneously,” said Yoo.
    Until now, surgeons had to predict the status of patients’ arteries by solely observing how their exterior forms change, which by then is too late for proper treatment. However, as this new catheter technology made possible the molecular imaging of both the exterior and interior infection status of the arteries, a wider vision is provided to the surgeons who could utilize the technology to take care of heart problems atpremature stages. “The technology itself is ready to be applied in reality, but there are still more procedures.