Dear AuntMinnie Member,
A new study presented at this week's American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting in Orlando confirms that prospectively gated sequential CT can cut radiation dose in half for cardiac studies -- without affecting image quality.
Sequential CT, also known as step-and-shoot, has piqued interest as a way to perform coronary CT angiography studies with sharply lower dose than conventional spiral scanning. In their ACC study, German researchers demonstrated that sequential CT not only cuts radiation dose in half, it also doesn't seem to negatively affect image quality. Read all about it by clicking here.
In another ACC presentation, U.S. researchers provide further evidence that echocardiography contrast media is safe to use even in critically ill heart patients. The study compared mortality rates in a group of patients who received echo contrast to those of a group that didn't, and found that the contrast group actually had fewer patient deaths.
Will the study prompt the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to further relax its black box warning label for echo contrast? Only time will tell, but you can read the article by clicking here.
Get the rest of the news from the ACC meeting, as well as business news on new cardiac imaging products, in our Cardiac Imaging Digital Community at cardiac.auntminnie.com.
