Myocardial Solutions has begun to enroll patients in a clinical study designed to compare cardiac strain encoding stress testing with MRI cine stress testing.
Strain encoding (SENC) technology was co-developed by image analysis software firm Diagnosoft and Johns Hopkins University and is designed for use with cardiac MRI to measure subtle changes in heart muscle performance.
The multicenter study is underway at two sites in the U.S. and two in Europe using MRI scanners from Philips Healthcare to confirm results of a comparative single-site study from Heidelberg, Germany, in 320 patients.
Myocardial Solutions hopes to commercialize the stress-testing technique as an alternative to cardiac nuclear stress testing. The company said that SENC can be performed in less time than MRI cine and can reduce false positives associated with nuclear testing.
