Name Sandor Kovacs | ||
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Sándor J. Kovács (born August 17, 1947) is a Hungarian-American academic cardiologist and cardiovascular physiologist, best known for his work on the physiological dynamics of the human heart. He is a professor of medicine, physics, physiology, and biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Early life and education
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Kovács, with his parents and sister, fled Hungary at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. His earliest memories are of scarcity and hardship during the communist era. The family was interned in Austrian refugee camps until 1959, when they were allowed to immigrate to Brooklyn, New York. As Kovács recalled in an interview,
I remember there were no refrigerators, just iceboxes. And if you wanted chicken for dinner, you went to the market and brought home a live chicken, holding it by its feet.
Kovács graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and earned a B.S. in engineering at Cornell University in 1969. He then went to Caltech, where he initially studied theoretical and applied mechanics, transferred to physics and worked with Kip S. Thorne, receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1977. The title of his thesis was "The Generation of Gravitational Waves". While at Caltech, he was influenced by many interactions with Richard Feynman and George Zweig, when the latter was interested in the physics and physiology of human hearing.
Determined to change from theoretical physics to medicine, Kovács entered an accelerated Ph.D. to M.D. program at the University of Miami that awarded him a medical degree after 22 months of concentrated study, in 1979.
Career
Kovács' subsequent career has been entirely at Washington University in St. Louis. After an internship and residency at Barnes Hospital, he became an instructor in medicine in 1985, served as director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at the St Louis VA Medical Center (1985-1990) advancing through the ranks to professor of medicine, with also appointments in physiology, biomedical engineering, and physics, in 2007.
The Kovács lab has pioneered theoretical frameworks for analyzing diastole by incorporating and modeling the suction pump role of the heart, and the dynamics of the four-chambered heart in the space of coordinates spanned by P (pressure), V (volume), and their time rates of change dP/dt and dV/dt. They then seek to validate the model predictions using human, in vivo physiologic measurements of pressures (high fidelity transducers) and flows (echocardiography) of masses and volumes of heart chambers (cardiac MRI).
Among the results from this work is that the so-called third heart sound, "S3", formerly taught to be pathological, is actually produced by all hearts, but is merely below the threshold of hearing of most physicians.
Additional advances include the 'Parametrized Diastolic Filling (PDF) Formalism' wherein the early, mechanical suction-initiated rapid filling portion of diastole (the echocardiographic Doppler E-wave) is modeled kinematically in analogy to the recoil, from rest, of a damped simple harmonic oscillator. The linearity of the model allows solution of the inverse problem of diastole, using the digitized clinical Doppler E-wave contour as input, and obtaining unique values of the PDF parameters, that characterize load, viscosity/relaxation and chamber stiffness for each E-wave analyzed.
Among its many applications the PDF formalism led to solution of the long sought 'load-independent index of diastolic function' (LIIDF) problem, and to the realization that left ventricular volume at diastasis is the in vivo equilibrium volume of the left ventricle. In addition, kinematic characterization of diastolic function has advanced understanding of form and function via the relationship of vortex formation and endocardial motion to achieve optimal volume pumping in diastole.
Kovács spends about half of his time on clinical activities, especially performing cardiac catheterizations with the use of simultaneous echocardiography complemented by related cardiac MRI techniques.
In March 2016, Kovács delivered three, fifty minute guest lectures for Jim Miller's "Physics of the Heart" in front of enthused undergraduate students at the Danforth campus. These lectures took place in Crow Laboratories, and the attending students commented on the lectures' thoroughness and clarity. Students took an exam on April 6, 2016, where they were tested in part on material covered by Kovács. Topics included cardiac embryology, lymphatic drainage, and cardiac phase theory.
Selected publications
Honors
Kovács received the Sjöstrand Medal in Physiology from the Swedish Society of Clinical Physiology and Medicine in 2007. He was elected President of the Cardiovascular System Dynamics Society (CSDS) in 2006 and served until 2008. He is a recipient of the Öcsi Bácsi Award of Caltech's TAPIR Group. He is a distinguished foreign member of the Hungarian Society of Cardiology. He has been elected president of the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Medical Staff Association (2015-2016) and serves as a member of Board of Barnes-Jewish Hospital.