SPECT can identify which patients would benefit more from undergoingpercutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) than receiving therapy alonefor blocked coronary arteries, according to late-breaking trial resultspresented at the American Heart Association (AHA) conference inOrlando, Fla., this week.

With heart disease still the leading cause of death in the United States—as well as many other countries—imaging and health IT companies are putting forth an all-out effort to develop and connect cutting-edge diagnostic technology for cardiology. At the forefront of R&D efforts are ways to diagnose cardiovascular disease earlier with more and better information.Vendors are showing great progress as they continue to arm practitioners with newer, better, faster solutions for cardiac care. Among the inroads are enhancements for CT and angiography, upgraded clinical IT systems geared for cardiology and a host of easy-to-use advanced visualization and analysis tools that show more and do more.

Left ventricular noncompaction syndrome, a cardiomyopathy characterizedby deep trabeculations in the ventricular wall, is typically diagnosedby echocardiography. However, according to research published thismonth in the American Journal of Roentgenology, echocardiography may not visualize the apical region optimally, leading to underestimation of the degree of the disease. 

Myocardial tissue is morphologically homogenous, yet the heterogeneousuptake of 18F-FDG in the myocardium of healthy subjects is frequentlyobserved. A team of Italian researchers, in a study published thismonth in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, sought to determineif this impacts the proposed use of 18F-FDG distribution alone for thepurpose of determining myocardial viability.

Frank Giordano, MD, assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine anddirector of the molecular cardiology program at Yale University Schoolof Medicine, suggested that the future of interventional cardiologywill be a synergism of biology and devices. In a counterpointpresentation, Daniel, Burkhoff, MD, associate professor of medicine atColumbia University in New York City said that device-based therapiesprovide the most realistic methods for the foreseeable future in thefield.  

A prospective study investigating the use of MRI to detect clinicallyunrecognized myocardial infarctions has laid the groundwork todetermine if these findings have a different pathogenesis thanrecognized myocardial infarctions.

Sectra has signed an agreement with the Minneapolis-based Vital Imagesunder which Sectra will be able to integrate Vital Images’ Vitreasoftware as part of Sectra PACS.

For vascular intervention, MRI should be used for diagnoses,particularly with x-ray fiducial markers (XFM), which fuses x-raytechnology with MRI, according to Robert Lederman, MD, clinicalresearch branch of the National Heart and Blood Institute.