From the April 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

These capabilities can also be found in the third-generation research system, which now also includes cardiac gating capabilities. It is the first of its kind in North America and has been running since April as part of the ongoing research collaboration with Siemens. It was recently used in April to perform the first cardiac scan for Mayo Clinic.

"This will be a game changer for coronary artery imaging, where not only are the vessels very small (a few millimeters), but they are moving very rapidly," said McCollough. "Also, the technology is inherently digital, which means certain sources of uncertainty in the data are no longer there. This makes the data very robust and information can be measured more accurately. This is a tremendous advantage for artificial intelligence applications."


Philips, CNIC partner to dramatically reduce cardiac MR acquisition time
Philips and the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) teamed up in June to develop a new protocol that could make cardiac MR as short as a few minutes.

Despite being noninvasive and delivering no radiation, MR is seldom used for cardiac imaging due to the difficulty of having patients lie still for about one hour inside the bore. Known as Enhanced SENSE by Static Outer-volume Subtraction (ESSOS), the technique is expected to increase the use of these exams by improving patient comfort with shorter scan time, increasing patient access to precision diagnosis, and lowering the cost of care.

In addition, while still obtaining the same parameters as the usual technique, the approach reduces the time patients spend inside the machine by more than 90%, and decreases the need to have very experienced operators for the acquisition of a CMR, something which could be relevant for nonacademic hospitals.

"We see this technology specifically valuable to characterize structural damage to the heart its function after myocardial infarction and whether the heart can be fully repaired," Dr. Borja Ibáñez, director of the Clinical Research Department of CNIC, Cardiologist at the University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Díaz, and clinical leader of this work, told HCB News.

In just over 20 seconds, the shape and function of the heart can be acquired with the approach, as can the degree of fibrosis after cardiac muscle death in another 20-second acquisition. This enables the cardiac study to be completed in less than a minute.

A patient simply holds their breath during an MR scan so that everything within their chest remains static, except for the beating heart. ESSOS allows clinicians to capture an image of the static outer volume part, only for this data to then be temporarily removed. The MR signal of the beating heart can now be more easily subtracted from subsequent scan data, and allows for up to four times faster acquisition of a 3D image of the heart, with a net acceleration factor of up to 32.

April 2022 Magazine

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