Washington People: Igor Efimov

Raised in a secret town in Siberia and trained in control theory for ICBM guidance, Igor Efimov, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, wouldn’t be working at WUSTL had the Soviet Union not broken up immediately after he defended his dissertation in biophysics, providing him an opportunity to leave. His research specialty is disturbances of cardiac rhythm known as arrhythmias, electrical impulses that race around and around the heart instead of moving from one end of the heart to the other and then pausing before repeating.

Dangerous arrhythmia analyzed in a heartbeat

Just one second, one heartbeat. That’s what is needed for a new, noninvasive functional imaging technology, developed by a Washington University in St. Louis scientist, to record data for locating the source in the heart of a dangerous cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia (VT). WUSTL researchers in biomedical engineering and medicine report in the Aug. 31, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine, that the technique would far more quickly find the source and type of VT, saving hours of mapping.