Caltech Spinoff Finds Hidden Heart Failure in Four of 10 Patients Screened

Four in 10 patients walked into their primary care doctor’s office carrying a hidden marker of heart failure that no one had detected. A five-minute test, built on technology that began in a Caltech laboratory, caught what standard screening had not.

Those are the central findings of a multicenter study published in the journal Physiological Measurement and announced Monday by Ventric Health, the Pasadena medical technology company headquartered at 117 East Colorado Boulevard, Suite 510. The study screened 1,238 high-risk patients across 25 primary care sites using the company’s Vivio System — a non-invasive device that estimates cardiac filling pressure through a modified blood-pressure cuff and single-lead electrocardiogram — and reported a 92.2% conclusive diagnostic rate, according to the company’s press release.

The device grew out of more than 15 years of research at Caltech in fluid dynamics, wave propagation, and electromechanical coupling, work led by Mory Gharib, the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Medical Engineering. Gharib co-founded Ventric Health in 2014 with Caltech postdoctoral researchers Niema Pahlevan and Derek Rinderknecht, and Sean Brady, now the company’s CEO. The Vivio System received FDA 510(k) clearance in October 2023.

In the new study, authored by Faisal Amlani and colleagues, trained medical assistants — not physicians or specialists — administered the screening in a dedicated 15-minute workflow that ran independently of standard office visits. Among the patients screened, 40.1% showed elevated left ventricular end-diastolic pressure, or LVEDP, above 18 millimeters of mercury — a marker of cardiogenic congestion that the study’s authors identified as a critical indicator of heart failure, according to the press release.

Of those patients with elevated LVEDP who completed the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ-12), a standardized symptom assessment, 59.8% were classified as having symptomatic Stage C heart failure, the study reported. The remaining 42.3% showed no symptoms — asymptomatic Stage B heart failure, the silent phase that can precede structural cardiac damage. Women made up 66% of the symptomatic group, a finding the company said underscores the burden of underdiagnosed heart failure risk in women.

“These findings demonstrate that the Vivio-facilitated screening workflow can be seamlessly integrated into scalable, population-level care models,” Thomas Cheek, MD, chief medical officer at Ventric Health, said in the company’s press release. “By enabling medical assistants to drive the acquisition protocol independently, health systems can efficiently identify asymptomatic Stage B patients before irreversible cardiac structural changes occur.”

Heart failure affects approximately 6.7 million Americans, according to the Heart Failure Society of America, and an estimated 65% of at-risk patients receive their first diagnosis in the emergency room or hospital — an average of 30 months after symptoms begin, according to Ventric Health. The condition contributed to more than 425,000 deaths in the United States in 2022, accounting for 45% of cardiovascular deaths, the HFSA reported.

The Physiological Measurement paper is the latest in a series of peer-reviewed studies involving the Vivio System, following a 2026 multicenter validation study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, a 2025 Heart Failure Society of America abstract on pre-symptomatic Stage A detection, and a 2025 study in JACC: Advances that screened more than 2,000 patients, according to Ventric Health. The company says nearly 30,000 tests have been performed with the device to date.

Ventric Health describes itself as a company dedicated to enabling the early detection of heart failure at the point of care. Its Vivio System is used by health systems, Medicare Accountable Care Organizations, and primary care groups across the country, according to the company.

From a Caltech lab where researchers studied the physics of blood flow, to a suite on Colorado Boulevard, to 25 clinics where a cuff and an algorithm found what no one else had looked for — the distance between a research question and a diagnosis keeps getting shorter.