Our Story

My name is Chris. My wife, Mika, and I founded Theodore's Heart Initiative in honor of our son.

Theodore was born with a congenital heart defect, a mass obstructing blood flow through his aortic arch, that hadn't been detected during pregnancy. We didn't know anything was wrong until after he arrived. By the time his condition was imaged and he could be transferred to a specialized pediatric cardiology team, the damage was too significant. We lost him soon after.

I'm not a clinician. I'm a parent who went looking for answers. And what I found surprised me: the tools to catch a defect like Theodore's already exist. Every standard prenatal anatomy scan, usually around 20 weeks, already looks at the fetal heart. A trained sonographer is right there, looking at the structures that matter.

The problem is that getting a clear, diagnostic-quality image of a fetal heart is genuinely hard. The heart is small. It's beating constantly. And capturing each of the standard views the way a confident diagnosis requires takes a level of skill and experience that simply isn't available everywhere, or to everyone.

There are four standard views that, taken together, open a window into the most common and most serious heart defects. One of them, the view that shows the aorta leaving the heart, is the view that could have shown us what was happening to Theodore.

That's what we're trying to change. Not by replacing the sonographer or the doctor, but by helping them, so fewer families learn what we learned the way we learned it.

Our Mission

Our mission is to leverage AI to support medical professionals in diagnosing congenital heart disease more consistently, more accurately, and early enough to save lives. We don't build technology to replace clinical judgment. We build tools that help the people who already do this work, so that where a family lives, or which clinic they walk into, matters less to whether a defect is caught in time.

Our Current Work

Our current project is real-time guidance software for prenatal ultrasound. As a sonographer scans, the system finds the fetal heart and gives a simple, color-coded signal: green when the image is clear enough, yellow when it needs adjustment, red when it's time to keep looking. The goal is to help capture good images of the standard heart views so nothing critical gets missed.

This project is where our effort is focused today, and it is one step toward the mission rather than the whole of it. It's early work: a proof of concept, not a finished medical device, and we're careful to say so. You can read exactly where we are, honestly, limitations and all, in our published research and our FAQ on what we do and don't claim.

Why a Nonprofit

We believe the barrier to detecting these defects earlier isn't the technology. It's access and attention. Tools like the ones we're building should belong in every prenatal clinic, not only the ones that can afford a specialist. That belief doesn't fit neatly into a business model, so we built an organization around the belief instead.

Everything we build, we build in Theodore's name.