Martin Black award for the best paper published in 2015

The publishers of Physiological Measurement (PMEA), IOP Publishing, in association with the journal owners, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM), jointly award an annual prize for the best paper published in PMEA during the previous year. A shortlist is constructed using the comments and ratings of our expert referees. The responsibility for deciding the ultimate winner then falls to the Editorial and International Advisory board members of the journal, who rank the shortlisted papers. After a quorum of members has voted, the paper that scores the most points wins.

For the 2015 award, five papers were shortlisted (Buendia et al 2015, Guzzetti et al 2015, Hoyer et al 2015, Parragh et al 2015 and Sanchez et al 2015). This year, all five received praise from the boards, but one paper emerged as a clear winner. We have much pleasure in advising readers that the 2015 Martin Black award goes to Stephanie Parragh, Bernhard Hametner, Martin Bachler, Thomas Weber, Bernd Eber and Siegfried Wassertheurer, a group with affiliations across Vienna.

Cardiovascular disease is the major cause of death in the Western world. There is quickening interest in using newer mathematical models and technologies to examine old concepts of how the heart and blood vessels interact. A prominent example in clinical hemodynamics of the oscillating circulatory system is how the forward pressure wave, from the heartbeat, and the backward pressure wave, reflected from the periphery, sum. Parragh and coworkers in Vienna used non-invasive measures of aortic flows and pressures to investigate the validity of model-synthesized flow waveforms for wave separation analysis in the aorta in a large number of patients, some of whom had systolic heart failure. A major finding is that the arterial waveform alone, coupled with mathematical models of blood flow, suffices for estimation of important hemodynamic properties of the circulation. Their work exemplifies the bringing together of concepts, techniques and analyses on a highly relevant problem with application to bedside physiology and medicine.

The full citation is:

Non-invasive wave reflection quantification in patients with reduced ejection fraction (2015 Physiol. Meas. 36 179–90)

Stephanie Parragh^1,2, Bernhard Hametner¹, Martin Bachler^1,2, Thomas Weber³, Bernd Eber³ and Siegfried Wassertheurer¹

¹ Health & Environment Department, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Biomedical Systems, Donau-City-Str. 1, 1220 Vienna, Austria

² Institute for Analysis and Scientific Computing, Vienna University of Technology, Wiedner Hauptstr. 8–10, 1040 Vienna, Austria

³ Cardiology Department, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, Grieskirchnerstr. 42, 4600 Wels, Austria

All of the shortlisted papers were of great merit, and the full top five are referenced below, in alphabetical order. In 2016, we have already published many high quality papers that should make the next award very competitive. We look forward to seeing the outstanding work that will be published by our authors during the rest of the year.