Declan O’Regan

BHF Chair of Cardiovascular AI, MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences

Declan O'Regan leads the Computational Cardiac Imaging Group at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences and is a consultant radiologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, where he directs imaging research. In 2024 the British Heart Foundation named him its first Chair of Cardiovascular AI at Imperial's Institute of Clinical Sciences, an award of 1.5 million pounds over five years, renewable for five more, to study how ageing changes the heart and how genes and environment shape cardiac function. His group trains machine learning models on imaging, genetic and environmental data from large cohorts: a 2023 paper in Nature Communications applied deep learning to cardiac MRI scans and electrocardiograms from about 40,000 UK Biobank participants to estimate heart age, and the group later published CardioKG in Nature Cardiovascular Research, a knowledge-graph tool for finding drug targets in heart disease. He is clinical theme lead for learning from heart disease patients at Imperial's BHF Centre of Research Excellence, sits on the board of the British Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance and on the BHF Advisory Council.