WASHINGTON With interventional cardiology procedures expected to grow beyond 7 million annually in the United States, specialists need to combine clearer images from advances in diagnosing heart disease with improved recordkeeping to provide more efficient procedures, experts from Siemens Medical Solutions recently told the 18th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) Scientific Session.

The cardiac patient population is growing rapidly, which actually presents an opportunity for both the clinical and technological communities to work proactively to bring together the latest advances in care, said Bappa Choudhury, Vice President, Global Solutions, Siemens Medical Solutions. The graying of America, combined with other environmental risk factors, including smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise means that cardiologists will see steadily increasing patient volume in the years to come. They must be better prepared to meet this opportunity.

According to Choudhury, workflow improvement presents the greatest prospect for improving care, outcomes and efficiency, but only if the environment is truly integrated. Choudhury explained that by using diagnostic and data management systems that are connected and work on shared data platforms, interventional cardiologists (ICs) and cath labs can eliminate unnecessary steps in the interventional cardiology procedure, and reduce staff time on non-clinical functions.


Siemens Cardiology Solutions can synchronize the viewing, imaging, reporting, treatment planning and archiving components of the process to streamline the cardiology practice, ultimately resulting in better patient care and reduced costs, said Choudhury. Creating Solutions for Interventional Cardiology As the patient population grows, Siemens continues to develop new technologies to improve interventional cardiology procedures and the workflow in the cath lab, many of which will be on display at TCT.

Siemens AXIOM Artis dFC, a floor-mounted interventional imaging solution with flat detector technology, is an all-digital single-plane C-arm cardiology system, which gives exceptional cardiac imaging performance and an expansive range of diagnostic and interventional applications from cardiac angiography to ECG-triggered fluoroscopy. The dFC large plate 30 x 40 is one of Siemens combo solutions that can be utilized in the cardiac and angio environments. Siemens has over 100 combo solutions installed.

More Industry Headlines