Innovation in Cardiac Imaging

Through­out the decades health­care has con­tin­ued to advance in tech­nol­o­gy, cus­tomer ser­vice and treat­ment options to sup­port and improve pre­ven­tive care, dis­ease man­age­ment and recov­ery for patients. Car­di­ol­o­gy in par­tic­u­lar has seen ground­break­ing inno­va­tions in advanced test­ing and min­i­mal­ly inva­sive pro­ce­dures to help iden­ti­fy and treat car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease early.

With heart dis­ease being the lead­ing cause of death for both men and women in the Unit­ed States, it is essen­tial that imag­ing, pro­ce­dures and pre­ven­tive care health prac­tices con­tin­ue to grow and evolve with recent innovations.

Advanced car­diac imag­ing is the foun­da­tion for dis­cov­er­ing accu­rate and ear­ly diag­no­sis. Through pre­cise imag­ing, car­di­ol­o­gists are able to iden­ti­fy your heart con­di­tion and cre­ate an effec­tive treat­ment plan for your diag­no­sis. The fol­low­ing imag­ing tech­niques have become some of the most effec­tive meth­ods for iden­ti­fy­ing heart disease.

Nuclear Car­diac Imaging

Advanced nuclear imag­ing for car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease pro­duces accu­rate, high qual­i­ty images of your heart and blood flow. Dur­ing this test, a small dose of radioac­tive trac­er is inject­ed into your blood stream and trav­els through the area that is being exam­ined. The trac­er emits gam­ma rays, which are detect­ed by a cam­era, that will take images to map blood flow and eval­u­ate heart mus­cle func­tion and your coro­nary arter­ies. The test will be per­formed in a med­ical lab, and depend­ing on the type of image your physi­cian is look­ing to obtain, he/​she will order a com­put­ed tomog­ra­phy (CT) scan, positron emis­sion tomog­ra­phy (PET) scan or mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (MRI) that can pro­duce spe­cial views spe­cif­ic to your heart condition.

These tests allow our car­di­ol­o­gists to iden­ti­fy sig­nif­i­cant heart con­di­tions, and/​or obstruc­tive block­ages in your coro­nary cir­cu­la­tion, that may require angio­plas­ty (sur­gi­cal blood ves­sel repair) or open-heart bypass surgery to restore nor­mal blood flow in your heart. With tens of thou­sands of nuclear imag­ing stud­ies already per­formed, our tech­nol­o­gists and car­di­ol­o­gists are able to crit­i­cal­ly eval­u­ate and offer their expert advice on a treat­ment plan for your spe­cif­ic heart condition.

Car­dioMEMs

Car­dioMEMS is a heart fail­ure mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem that pro­vides our car­di­ol­o­gists with pul­monary artery pres­sure mon­i­tor­ing and hemo­dy­nam­ic data to proac­tive­ly man­age your heart fail­ure con­di­tion. Your physi­cian will be able to use the Car­dioMEMs device infor­ma­tion to make changes to your treat­ment before you feel symp­toms. The wire­less device is implant­ed using a catheter based pro­ce­dure and does not require a bat­tery or any replace­able parts.

Echocar­dio­g­ra­phy

An echocar­dio­g­ra­phy (echo) is a pain-free test that uses sound waves to cre­ate mov­ing pic­tures that show the size and shape of your heart. With con­stant advance­ments in tech­nol­o­gy, the echo has evolved into many test forms that can be used to pro­duce car­diac results spe­cif­ic to what your physi­cian is examining.

The most com­mon type of echo is called the transtho­racic echocar­dio­g­ra­phy. Dur­ing this test, a device called a trans­duc­er is placed on your chest, send­ing ultra­sound waves through your chest wall to cre­ate a mov­ing pic­ture of your heart. The transtho­racic echo is used to exam­ine prob­lems with heart valves and blood flow. The results from this test can help your car­di­ol­o­gist iden­ti­fy the amount of blood being pumped out of the left ven­tri­cle, valve func­tion and areas of poor blood flow in the heart, as well as assess­ment of pre­vi­ous heart injuries.

The echo can also be used as a part of car­diac stress test­ing. Dur­ing a stress test, your car­di­ol­o­gist will have you exer­cise or take med­i­cine to pro­duce a hard and fast heart­beat. The echo trans­duc­er will start imag­ing your heart while it is work­ing hard­er than nor­mal. An echo stress test is ordered by your car­di­ol­o­gist when you are expe­ri­enc­ing chron­ic chest pain that may be due to coro­nary artery dis­ease. The stress test is able to deter­mine the cause of chest pain as well as how much exer­cise you can safe­ly tol­er­ate dur­ing car­diac rehabilitation.

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant advance­ments of the echo is the devel­op­ment of three-dimen­sion­al (3D) imag­ing. Real-time 3D imag­ing allows for improve­ment in the accu­ra­cy and visu­al­iza­tion of car­diac valves and con­gen­i­tal abnor­mal­i­ties that can pro­vide car­di­ol­o­gists with more guid­ance on inter­ven­tions for heart dis­ease. This test is per­formed like the transtho­racic echo, but uses a high­er qual­i­ty imag­ing tech­nique. The 3D echo can help iden­ti­fy sig­nif­i­cant heart con­di­tions and improp­er blood flow and can also be used to over­see heart func­tion dur­ing surgery as well as mon­i­tor an un-born baby’s heartbeat.

As advanced imag­ing tech­niques con­tin­ue to evolve and are avail­able to patients with heart con­di­tions, they help increase ear­ly diag­no­sis and pre­ven­tive health treat­ments that can low­er your risk of chron­ic heart dis­ease or failure.

For a full list of our car­di­ol­o­gy imag­ing tech­niques, please vis­it our car­di­ol­o­gy page. For more infor­ma­tion or to sched­ule an appoint­ment with a car­di­ol­o­gist, sched­ule an appoint­ment online or by call­ing your pre­ferred loca­tion.