Vibeke Almaas successfully defended her PhD thesis "Obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Pathophysiology and clinical management" in October 2015. Her supervisors were Professor Emeritus Jan Peder Amlie, MD, PhD, University of Oslo and Professor Svend Aakhus, MD, PhD, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

She found that a type of scarring in the heart muscle, interstitial fibrosis, in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), is associated with severe cardiac arrhythmia and that a newly developed cardiac ultrasound examination can identify patients at increased risk. Together with Scandinavian colleagues, Vibeke M. Almaas has shown that PTSMA is a safe and effective treatment for obstructive HCM patients.

In the period 2001-2009, over a hundred HCM patients were referred to Department of Cardiology, Rikshospitalet, Oslo University Hospital, for PTSMA; a catheter-based method of applying a myocardial infarction to the thickened heart partition, or myectomy; a heart operation where the thickened part of the heart partition is removed. Obstructive HCM patients have thickened cardiac wall that prevents blood from flowing freely into the main artery. These patients may be offered PTSMA or myectomy. A treatment team with experience in HCM assessed whether conditions were suitable for PTSMA or whether surgical correction and myectomy were needed. Before and after PTSMA / myectomy, patients were examined, among other things, with 48-hour cardiac rhythm recording, cardiac ultrasound and magnetic resonance (MRI) of the heart. The heart muscle tissue removed by myectomy was examined microscopically. PTSMA-treated patients were included in a Scandinavian database where long-term follow-up after PTSMA was recorded.

In her thesis Almaas and her colleagues showed that the catheter-based method PTSMA can be safely performed at centers with experienced invasive cardiologists and that interstitial fibrosis, scarring associated with severe arrhythmia, is not so readily seen in cardiac MRI examination, but scarring leads to reduced function of the heart muscle which can be identified by a fast and simple heart ultrasound method.