St. John’s debuts heart-imaging technology

The machine is installed and has been used on test patients for the last week. Physicians on Monday will begin its regular use.

Previous diagnostic procedures for coronary disease and other heart complications were done through an angiogram – an invasive surgery that took days of recovery. The CT scanner, all done through small amounts of radiation and computer imaging, can be done in six seconds, allowing the patient to spend as little as 15 minutes at the hospital for the procedure, said Dr. Kelvin Van Osdol, chair of the St. John’s cardiology department.

“From a cardiac standpoint, this has far-reaching diagnostic advantages,” he said. “Really, we don’t have a test at this point in time that does what this test does.”

The advantages of the new system, Van Osdol said, go beyond its noninvasive benefit. It can provide 3-D images of the heart and its chambers, valves and arteries. It also can be used as an early artery plaque-detection test, as well as provide a look at other parts of the body where problems may be occurring.

Earlier scans of the heart on older technology provided images with less resolution, making it harder to identify problem areas, Van Osdol said.

St. John’s is still in the process of identifying the test’s cost to patients, as are insurance companies that are slightly leary about new technologies, Osdol said. He noted that a test on the CT scanner would likely be cheaper than that of an angiogram. [[In-content Ad]]