Investigator Full Prof (M) Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Mass General Research Institute

acute lung injury; airway liquid absorption; asthma; bronchoconstricted asthmatics; bronchoconstriction; copd; inhalation therapy; lung; positron-emission tomography; pulmonary circulation; pulmonary embolism; pulmonary fibrosis; pulmonary gas exchange; pulmonary ventilation; respiration; respiratory mechanics

Dr. Venegas is an associate professor in anesthesia (bio-engineering) at Harvard Medical School, and is with the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care. His career has been involved in developing an understanding of asthma and other conditions through PET imaging for quantitative assessment of the topographical distributions of inflammation, ventilation, perfusion, intrapulmonary shunts and gas trapping.  In addition to being the PI or Co-I in several NIH-NHLBI funded Grants, Dr. Venegas has worked on the development of devices for accurate exposure to inhalation gases for spontaneous breathing in small animals and human subjects and a device for enhanced inhalation therapy for emphysema.

Under the leadership of Dr. Venegas, The Pulmonary Imaging and Bioengineering Laboratory has been established at Mass General.

This core lab offers cutting edge techniques for imaging the lungs of large animal models of lung disease and of human patients, quantification of the anatomical intrapulmonary deposition of aerosol therapeutics and the distribution of gaseous molecules within the lung and imaging methods combined with advanced computational models. Capabilities include: