Dear Cardiac Imaging Insider,
Today we bring you spanking new images from the first clinical study of patients undergoing coronary CT angiography (CTA) on a 320-slice CT scanner, which can image most patients in a single heartbeat. Researchers from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital were among the first to install the machine last November, and wasted no time getting their peer-reviewed study published. See what they saw here.
In ultrasound news, tissue Doppler echocardiography got a boost at last week's American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting in Chicago, where the modality was reported to have superior diagnostic and prognostic capabilities compared to conventional echo.
In more than 1,000 randomly selected individuals, Danish researchers found that tissue Doppler not only found individuals with cardiac dysfunction, but predicted which ones would go on to suffer adverse events. Read about their long-term results in this issue's Insider Exclusive.
In other news from the meeting, St. Louis investigators reported that echo contrast agents are safe, despite their black box warning from the FDA. In fetal imaging, echocardiography did fairly well in detecting fetal cardiac abnormalities, but still missed 15% of minor heart defects, Canadian researchers reported this month.
PET scored a victory over perfusion imaging, CT angiography, and MR angiography for detecting coronary artery disease in a high-risk population, according to a new study in Academic Radiology.
But in a low-prevalence population, researchers from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, CA, found that coronary CTA was the way to go. In two new studies from the ACC meeting, CTA saved time, money, and the lives of a few unsuspecting firefighters. Unfortunately, another ACC study showed that too few clinicians are bothering to minimize radiation dose.
Be sure to scroll down for more news from the heart, handsomely presented in a redesigned Cardiac Imaging Digital Community.
