Matthias G. Friedrich, MD
Matthias Friedrich was the former director of the Stephenson Cardiovascular MR Centre at the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta. In March 2005, the new CMR Centre opened its doors to the public and serves as a centre of excellence for research for our region. Within the recent years, it has become one of the largest CMR programs in the world. Friedrich is currently the director of the CMR Centre at the Montreal Heart Institute.
Dr. Friedrich was born in 1961 in South Germany. He studied Medicine at the University of Erlangen, Germany and earned his Medical Degree in 1990. From 1994 to 2002, he completed his training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
In 1987, while in Medical School, he was one of the first medical researchers to focus on Magnetic Resonance of the heart, using MR Spectroscopy to identify metabolic changes caused by coronary artery disease. He was also one of the first to develop routine protocols for clinical application of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (CMR) in cardiology. Since then, he has continued to work enthusiastically in both research and clinical application of this technique.
In 1998, Dr. Friedrich supervised the acquisition and use of one of the first dedicated CMR systems at the Franz-Volhard-Klinik, Humboldt University, Berlin. He and his (then) team developed one of the largest research groups in CMR in the world. They have been performing over 1500 clinical CMR studies and hundreds of research studies per year. He has also initiated one of the largest and still working CMR training programs. Furthermore, he developed solutions for remote CMR reporting. He completed his Cardiology training in 2002, with a special interest in intensive care medicine, invasive cardiology, and nono-invasive imaging.
Dr. Friedrich is actively involved in national and international organizations, is a reviewer of numerous specialty journals, and member of several editorial boards. He has published more than 100 papers and book chapters, several of them regarded by experts as seminal works in the field. He has organized international CMR meetings. In the world's largest organization for CMR, the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR), he acted as the Scientific Program Chair for 2007 and 2008. He also founded the Canadian Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, of which he is the Immediate Past President. He is also Chief Scientific Advisor to Circle Cardiovascular Imaging Inc. and designs software for post-processing, evaluating and reporting CMR images.
As of April 2010, Dr. Friedrich is Full Professor of Medicine with the Departments of Cardiac Sciences and Radiology at the University of Calgary.
Aside from his intense interest in CMR, Dr. Friedrich spends as much time as possible with his wife and four children, with reading, sports (swimming and running) and sometimes with playing piano or guitar.
Click here to view Dr. Friedrich's publications.
