Summary
Dr Wei Li is Professor of Practice (Adult Congenital Heart Disease and Echocardiography) at National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London and Consultant and Clinical Lead in Adult Congenital Heart Disease and Echocardiography at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust.
Dr Li studied Medicine at Northwest University for Nationalities and achieved MB BS (1984) with First Place Ranking. She was awarded MD (1991) for her thesis on infantile cardiomyopathy for which she studied three years full time at Peking Union Medical College and National Heart Lung and Blood Vessel Medical Centre. She came to the UK to conduct research funded by the Fielding Medical Scholarship towards her PhD at Imperial College London on the subject of atrial arrhythmia in adult congenital heart disease which was awarded in 2001. She has continued to contribute adult congenital heart disease clinical research publications since.
Research interests
Her research focuses on integrated cardiac physiology in patients with ACHD/structural heart disease and pulmonary artery hypertension (PAH), studied using echocardiographic/Doppler expertise.
Her clinical research projects have not only helped produce publications in high impact factor journals but also contributed to guidelines and to significant improvement in patient care locally and internationally.
Major research contributions and their impact and influence for ACHD patients
- She has contributed over 150 peer-reviewed clinical research publications a current list of which can be found at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/Wei.Li/publications.html
- She has authored the only text book on Echocardiography in Adult Congenital Heart Disease (Springer 2007) and has written 20 chapters for books edited by others.
- She has first authored by invitation the Consensus recommendations for echocardiography in adults with congenital heart defects from the International Society of Adult Congenital Heart Disease (ISACHD) (2018).
- She has contributed to the current EACVI position statement: Imaging the adult with congenital heart disease: a multimodality imaging approach (2018) and contributed to an highly cited ACHD imaging review in European Heart Journal 2015
Teaching
She has always been deeply committed to building up the professional competence of colleagues in this subspecialty: internally and externally; this has been achieved through her leadership in the provision of education.
- She regularly teaches on numerous Imperial College London and national and international courses. For example, she organises training courses at Imperial/RBHT for Echocardiography and Multimodality Imaging assessment of ACHD and pulmonary hypertension where delegates come from all over the world to attend.
- Dr Wei Li lectures regularly at the MSc Medial Ultrasound course at Imperial college (>10 years) and supervises student MSc projects.
- Dr Wei Li supervises BSc project for medical students at Imperial College.
- She has been responsible for training many visiting fellows in ACHD echocardiography who have subsequently become ACHD programme directors in their own centres in the UK and abroad.
- She has participated in a studio interview on multimodality imaging tutorials for online training instigated by the EACVI (part of the European Society of Cardiology), (2018)
- She is on the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) accreditation committee and involve in leading and establishing the European accreditation criteria for Congenital Echocardiography.
- She is a frequently invited speaker at international conferences and has given >100 lectures, chaired many sessions and is a programme organiser of scientific sessions.
Clinical Practice
She joined the medical staff at Royal Brompton Hospital in 1997. For more than 20 years, she has promoted ACHD echocardiography through her work at Imperial/RBHT and through her external engagements.
She has worked tirelessly to build-up and develop the Royal Brompton clinical service for the ACHD patient community and has often done this by translating her research findings to daily clinical practice. She leads the echocardiography ACHD service at Royal Brompton, grew the group, set up specialist echo services for pregnant women, patients with cardiac devices or with pulmonary hypertension and introduced new techniques such as stress exercise echocardiography, 3D TOE and contrast echo.
Her expertise in establishing the provision of world-class Echocardiography services was recognised by her appointment as lead expert for the International Society of Adult Congenital Heart Disease (ISACHD) working party to create a set of agreed protocols for echocardiography. This work was published as a statement paper by ISACHD in 2018. This is a key document designed to encourage standardisation in the delivery of these services internationally.
Publications
Journals
Mushemi-Blake S, Surkova E, Hatipoglu S, et al., 2020, Severe regurgitation of a double-orifice left atrioventricular valve in a patient with repaired atrioventricular septal defect: added value of 3D echocardiography, European Heart Journal-cardiovascular Imaging, Vol:21, ISSN:2047-2404, Pages:814-814
Martin-Garcia AC, Dimopoulos K, Boutsikou M, et al., 2020, Tricuspid regurgitation severity after atrial septal defect closure or pulmonic valve replacement, Heart, Vol:106, ISSN:1355-6037, Pages:455-461
Diller G-P, Lammers AE, Babu-Narayan S, et al., 2019, Denoising and artefact removal for transthoracic echocardiographic imaging in congenital heart disease: utility of diagnosis specific deep learning algorithms, International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, Vol:35, ISSN:1569-5794, Pages:2189-2196
Li W, Yin Y, Dimopoulos K, et al., 2019, Early and late effects of cardiac resynchronization therapy in adult congenital heart disease, Journal of the American Heart Association, Vol:8, ISSN:2047-9980
McCabe C, Vranesic II, Verdes MC, et al., 2019, Reply to Echocardiographic predictors of outcome in PAH, International Journal of Cardiology, Vol:294, ISSN:0167-5273, Pages:58-58