Word: cardiac
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...least that's where things stood until recently. The past 18 months have brought a wave of advances in cardiac imaging, leading many doctors to wonder whether it's time to change the way they diagnose and treat heart disease. Leading the way are improvements in CT (for computed tomography) scanning, which uses highly specialized X-ray machines to take multiple, finely layered pictures of the heart and surrounding blood vessels. Sophisticated computer programs sort the data to generate amazingly detailed, three-dimensional images like the ones that alerted Fackelmann's doctors to his hidden heart problem. Advances in other...
...year complaining of chest pain. Most of them are not suffering a heart attack, but it can be very tricky to separate out which ones have indigestion or a strained muscle from those who have something much, much more dangerous. A noninvasive test that shows whether or not the cardiac blood vessels are blocked could help make the diagnosis a lot easier. "We used to say to patients who came in with chest pain [and no other signs of cardiac disease], 'I don't think you have coronary disease,'" says Dr. Mario Garcia at the Cleveland Clinic, which has been...
Medical groups are racing to keep up with these changes. In July, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association published their first guidelines on how to train doctors to perform the new cardiac scans. Three studies have shown that cardiac CT is 90% accurate at picking up blockages like Fackelmann's. But no standards have been written yet for determining under what conditions using the new scans makes the most sense, and for which patients. More definitive answers may be forthcoming at the annual American Heart Association meeting in November, when several research groups are expected...
...Medical Information Division of Des Plaines, Ill., doctors perform annually at least 11.5 million echocardiograms, which use sound waves to produce pictures of the internal structures of the heart, and more than 9 million nuclear perfusion scans, which use mildly radioactive tracer molecules to measure how well the cardiac muscle is nourished. Improvements in computer processing power and software have made these tests more reliable and more conclusive than ever before. Stress tests, which help doctors detect ischemia, or lack of blood flow to the cardiac muscle, can be performed using either echocardiograms or nuclear scans. "Echocardiograms and nuclear perfusion...
...This higher number increases the resolution of the final image and decreases the amount of time needed to make it. It takes about eight heartbeats to get a complete picture, but sophisticated computer software makes it possible for images to be taken at precisely the same part of the cardiac cycle--ensuring that the heart is in the same position. The downside: people with irregular heartbeats aren't the best candidates for cardiac...