Nicholas Houstis, MD, PhD

Dr. Houstis is a computer scientist, biologist, and cardiologist whose research interests span exercise physiology, cardiovascular hemodynamics, and clinical informatics.

Cardiologists routinely collect complex multimodal data from patients, from symptoms and physical exam findings, to electrical, mechanical, structural, and even molecular properties of a patient’s cardiovascular system. Often the cardiologist must analyze and synthesize these data types with little more than a mental model of the patient. From deceptively simple questions like whether the patient will respond to fluid resuscitation, to plainly challenging ones like whether an impaired right ventricle will tolerate placement of a left ventricular assist device, the cardiologist must mentally reconstruct the patient’s physiology from the shadows it casts in the form of state measurements.

The Houstis Lab aims to build tools that take the guesswork out of such mental analyses, replacing them with a systematic, quantitative, interpretable, and trustworthy computational analysis that has been vetted on real-world data. Two problem classes that are under investigation in the lab include the real-time interpretation of ECG telemetry and the comprehensive analysis of cardiovascular hemodynamics as measured in the cardiac catheterization lab or the intensive care unit. The tools for these problems are drawn from state-of-the-art developments in computer science, ranging from digital twins to deep generative models, neural ordinary differential equations, and reinforcement learning.

Dr. Houstis received his MS in Computer Science from Purdue University at the age of 17. He subsequently obtained his PhD in Biology from M.I.T in the lab of Eric Lander. He graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He went on to complete his cardiovascular fellowship and post-doctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is currently on staff as a cardiologist and scientist.

Research Areas
Genetics
Cardiac Physiology and Disease
Vascular Biology and Metabolism

Publications
View Publications