Professor Declan O’Regan appointed the first BHF Chair of Cardiovascular AI

Professor Declan O'Regan

Celebrating the success of Professor Declan O'Regan who has been appointed the first BHF Chair of Cardiovascular AI.

We’re thrilled to announce that Professor Declan O’Regan has been awarded the British Heart Foundation’s first Chair of Cardiovascular AI at the Institute of Clinical Sciences, Imperial College London.  Declan leads the Computational Cardiac Imaging Group at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) and is a Consultant Radiologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.  

The £1.5M award will help Declan and his team develop new AI-based approaches to understand how ageing affects the heart, what drives diversity in human cardiovascular disease and how genes and environmental factors influence cardiac function. 

Declan’s research focuses on using machine learning to explore the mechanisms that underpin common cardiovascular diseases, such as heart failure and high blood pressure, by integrating data from human imaging, genetics and environmental risk factors. His work includes predicting patient outcomes, discovering potential therapeutic targets and identifying genetic risk factors for heart conditions. 

Declan is one of the UK’s leading cardiovascular researchers and has published extensively on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cardiovascular research. Research led by his group at the LMS and published in Nature Communications in 2023 showed that training a deep learning algorithm on MRI images and electrocardiograms of hearts from almost 40,000 UK Biobank participants could predict the heart age of a participant, allowing for the early identification of those at risk of cardiovascular diseases.  

Research leadership in Cardiovascular AI 

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) awards Chairs, also known as professorships, to individuals with outstanding cardiovascular research achievements. This is the first time they have given this award to support research activities and leadership in Cardiovascular AI. 

Declan’s Chair will support a program that harnesses advances in computer vision, AI and genomics to investigate:  

• How ageing affects the heart  
• New approaches to classifying diseases, assessing risk and measuring how well treatments work  
• How genetic and environmental factors interact to cause disease 

The award will also be used to create a new Cardiovascular Data Science Lab where scientists from diverse fields will have a single space to collaborate. It will also provide an opportunity to provide mentorship to the growing number of early career clinician scientists training in digital health. 

Declan took up the title of BHF Chair of Cardiovascular AI at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial in July 2024. This is alongside continuing his clinical work, his role as a Group Leader at the LMS, and as the Clinical Theme Lead for Learning from heart disease patients at the BHF Centre of Research Excellence within Imperial’s National Heart and Lung Institute. The award is £1.5M for the first 5 years and is then renewable for up to 10 years. 

We are incredibly proud to see an LMS Group Leader recognised with this prestigious award. Declan’s transdisciplinary work, which spans both the clinic and the laboratory, and which will be further supported by this award, is key to helping the LMS achieve its strategic goals to integrate beyond discipline boundaries and fully unlock the transformational potential of LMS research, creating a lasting impact on human health. 

Professor Declan O’Regan, Head of the Computational Cardiac Imaging Group at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, said: “It's a great privilege to be awarded the BHF Chair and this is recognition of what our amazing team of students and postdoctoral fellows is working towards over the coming years. The responsible use of AI has great potential to accelerate discoveries in biomedical science and this will support our future ambitions for interdisciplinary research.” 

Professor James Leiper, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “We’re delighted to appoint Professor Declan O’Regan as the British Heart Foundation’s first Professor of Cardiovascular AI. With 7.6 million people in the UK living with cardiovascular disease, and over 425,000 people on cardiac waiting lists in England, the search for new ways of detecting, diagnosing and treating heart conditions is more urgent than ever. Professor O’Regan’s research sits at the cutting-edge of the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. As a BHF Professor, his work will act as a springboard for advances that will drive transformations in treatment and care for people living with and at risk of cardiovascular disease.”