Dear Cardiac Imaging Insider,
Lately high-pitch mode has been making inroads in many indications -- especially when the imaging target is moving fast.
Considering all the things that can trigger a scan of the coronary arteries, such as chest pain, assessing the patency of coronary artery stents happens frequently enough that dose needs to be a priority.
In fact, stent assessment is turning out to be a great indication for dual-source high-pitch scanning, according to researchers from Singapore, who examined their patients using an average of less than 1 mSv of radiation.
Get the rest of the story from the recent Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography (SCCT) meeting in this issue's Insider Exclusive, brought to you before it appears on the general site.
Even though there are a lot of stents out there, it doesn't make them all necessary, according to another report.
High-pitch coronary CT angiography (CTA) does a great job in children as well, removing some of the worry about choosing CT even when it's the best option, according to another story from SCCT. Find out more here.
In female patients you can also cut the coronary CTA dose by manually displacing the breasts -- which seems sensible enough that everyone should be doing it. According to the story by associate editor Kate Madden Yee, doubling up the dose protection with breast shielding yields even more dramatic results. Find out how much dose the group saved by clicking here.
Coronary CTA using 320-detector rows was also very stingy with dose, according to researchers who compared it directly to 64-detector-row CT in the emergency department. Learn what else they found by clicking here.
For a more comprehensive one-stop cardiac assessment, hybrid PET/CT might be the answer. Ohio physicians are using it to noninvasively differentiate between ischemic and nonischemic cardiomyopathy, among other tasks, according to the story you'll find here.
For that matter, MRI is revealing the signs and secrets of cardiomyopathy, a type of acute heart failure that is triggered by stressful events. Click here for the story by features editor Wayne Forrest, or simply visit our Cardiac Imaging Digital Community for all the news that fits. Please scroll down the page for a heaping helping of more stories too!
