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Main Authors: Thakur, Sukirt, Roper, Marcus, Zhou, Yang, Isaev, Dmitry Yu., Bafghi, Reza Akbarian, Nallamothu, Brahmajee K., Figueroa, C. Alberto, Paruchuri, Srinivas, Burger, Scott, Collet, Carlos, Raissi, Maziar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17192
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author Thakur, Sukirt
Roper, Marcus
Zhou, Yang
Isaev, Dmitry Yu.
Bafghi, Reza Akbarian
Nallamothu, Brahmajee K.
Figueroa, C. Alberto
Paruchuri, Srinivas
Burger, Scott
Collet, Carlos
Raissi, Maziar
author_facet Thakur, Sukirt
Roper, Marcus
Zhou, Yang
Isaev, Dmitry Yu.
Bafghi, Reza Akbarian
Nallamothu, Brahmajee K.
Figueroa, C. Alberto
Paruchuri, Srinivas
Burger, Scott
Collet, Carlos
Raissi, Maziar
contents More than 10 million coronary angiograms are performed globally each year, providing a gold standard for detecting obstructive coronary artery disease. Yet, no obstructive lesions are identified in 70% of patients evaluated for ischemic heart disease. Up to half of these patients have undiagnosed, life-limiting coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD), which remains under-detected due to the limited availability of invasive tools required to measure coronary flow reserve (CFR). Here, we introduce PUNCH, a non-invasive, uncertainty-aware framework for estimating CFR directly from standard coronary angiography. PUNCH integrates physics-informed neural networks with variational inference to infer coronary blood flow from first-principles models of contrast transport, without requiring ground-truth flow measurements or population-level training. The pipeline runs in approximately three minutes per patient on a single GPU. Validated on synthetic angiograms with controlled noise and imaging artifacts, as well as on clinical bolus thermodilution data from 20 patients, PUNCH demonstrates accurate and uncertainty-calibrated CFR estimation. This approach establishes a new paradigm for CMD diagnosis and illustrates how physics-informed inference can substantially expand the diagnostic utility of available clinical imaging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17192
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PUNCH: Physics-informed Uncertainty-aware Network for Coronary Hemodynamics
Thakur, Sukirt
Roper, Marcus
Zhou, Yang
Isaev, Dmitry Yu.
Bafghi, Reza Akbarian
Nallamothu, Brahmajee K.
Figueroa, C. Alberto
Paruchuri, Srinivas
Burger, Scott
Collet, Carlos
Raissi, Maziar
Machine Learning
More than 10 million coronary angiograms are performed globally each year, providing a gold standard for detecting obstructive coronary artery disease. Yet, no obstructive lesions are identified in 70% of patients evaluated for ischemic heart disease. Up to half of these patients have undiagnosed, life-limiting coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD), which remains under-detected due to the limited availability of invasive tools required to measure coronary flow reserve (CFR). Here, we introduce PUNCH, a non-invasive, uncertainty-aware framework for estimating CFR directly from standard coronary angiography. PUNCH integrates physics-informed neural networks with variational inference to infer coronary blood flow from first-principles models of contrast transport, without requiring ground-truth flow measurements or population-level training. The pipeline runs in approximately three minutes per patient on a single GPU. Validated on synthetic angiograms with controlled noise and imaging artifacts, as well as on clinical bolus thermodilution data from 20 patients, PUNCH demonstrates accurate and uncertainty-calibrated CFR estimation. This approach establishes a new paradigm for CMD diagnosis and illustrates how physics-informed inference can substantially expand the diagnostic utility of available clinical imaging.
title PUNCH: Physics-informed Uncertainty-aware Network for Coronary Hemodynamics
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17192