RobertSouferMD

Summary

• Robert Soufer joined Yale as a Cardiology fellow and thereafter a Nuclear Medicine Residency. Upon completing his training, he became an Assistant Professor at Yale. Currently, he is Chief of the Cardiovascular Medicine Section at VA-CT Health Care Systems.
  
  Dr. Soufer’s research has been motivated by the pursuit of models for recurring clinical presentations lacking conceptual constructs. He first encountered patients with signs and symptoms of heart failure with normal left ventricular function. This resulted in his seminal publication concerning the description, frequency and mechanism of Diastolic Heart Failure, currently a major cohort of CHF patients. Thereafter he turned his attention to the mediation of emotions such as anger to the development of myocardial ischemia. He established the Yale/VA Positron Emission Tomography Center, one of the first multidisciplinary imaging centers of its kind, dedicated to clinical research and integration of scientists from varied disciplines/approach to answer similar clinical queries not addressed by extant efforts. During this period, he established Yale as one of the earliest centers engaged in CV metabolic imaging. Thereafter, working with the late Neuroscientist P.G. Rakic, he innovated techniques to simultaneously measure cerebral and myocardial blood during emotionally provocative interventions. This resulted in innovative publications of the first dynamic mappings of the brain during the transduction of myocardial ischemia in response to standardized emotionally stressful laboratory intervention in patients. This work shaped and broadened the conceptual construct in Neurocardiac interaction investigation. Specifically, paradigms of emotionally provoked myocardial ischemia, termed MSMI, (Mental Stress Induced Myocardial Ischemia).