Dr. Christos Mihos, with Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Heart Institute, is overseeing a study called “FIT-TWIST” to closely monitor the effects of a standard cardiac rehab program on patients who’ve had heart attacks.

“The heart is a muscle, just like any other muscle in our body. It’s the most complex muscle in our body and it moves in very intricate ways -- let’s say three dimensional ways -- and what we’re doing with this study is we’re saying, ‘OK, you’ve had a heart attack.’ We do an echocardiogram, which is just a basic ultrasound of the heart, but we apply very advanced modalities called speckle tracking and that allows us to visualize that three dimensional motions that we’re talking about,” Mihos said.

The goal is to tailor physical therapy to each individual patient.

The study was funded by the Florida Heart Research Foundation.