Cardiac MRI on the Leading Edge
The American Heart Association estimates that nearly one million US residents die of heart disease annually, and according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention it is the leading cause of death for both men and women. As a result, finding ways to detect heart disease earlier and more accurately are becoming increasingly important. Toshiba’s advancements in MRI are helping physicians quantify heart disease, thus improving diagnosis and treatment.
MRI has long been used to assess the structure and morphology of the heart, but as the technology advances, so do the procedures available to clinicians for quick and accurate diagnosis of heart disease in their patients. “The bread-and-butter sequence is called SSFP [steady-state free precession] cine imaging,” Erin Kelly, clinical science manager for MRI at Toshiba America Medical Systems, explains. “It gives an image of the heart as it moves through the cardiac cycle to tell the clinicians how the muscles are functioning, and they can use these images to calculate ejection fraction and left-ventricular volume.”
The ability to perform SSFP cine imaging is one of many cardiac-friendly features included in Toshiba’s Vantage™ Titan MRI, a 1.5T system that also includes a 16-element cardiac coil that can be combined with the 32-element spine coil. The center elements are smaller, resulting in higher-resolution imaging of the heart, and “the elements in the coils can be turned on and off to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio,” Kelly notes. Various sequences and parameters are selectable from the scanner to facilitate successful evaluation of the heart, including delayed-enhancement, myocardial imaging, retrospective gating, black-blood imaging, and real-time motion correction to name a few. Non-contrast techniques are also available on all Toshiba MR systems. For example, Whole Heart Imaging is one contrast-free sequence that allows physicians to assess the coronary arteries without contrast.
Timothy Albert, MD, is medical director of the Cardiovascular Diagnostic Center at Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System, Salinas, California, and he uses the Vantage Atlas system. He says, “We try to use noncontrast imaging as much as possible, both for patient convenience and safety and because of concerns about patients with kidney problems. For scar imaging, you still need contrast, but the other stuff, we can often do without it.”
Albert says that MRI has an important place in the portfolio of modalities used to detect and plan treatment for heart disease. “I use CT for coronary imaging, but that’s a small part of the cardiac question,” he says. “MRI’s strengths are really in functional imaging—the shape of the heart and how it’s beating. There’s an increasing amount of scientific data coming out about new uses for MRI in cardiac care.” Albert and his team even run a two-day training course designed to help educate referring physicians on the robust applications of cardiac MRI.
“MRI is ideal for assessment of the heart-failure patient, looking at the potential causes to guide treatments and diagnostic tests, and we use it to determine whether someone would benefit from being revascularized after a heart attack,” Albert says. “For patients with congenital abnormalities, it’s the gold standard, since CT radiation could be cumulative over time. In the future, we hope physicians will hear about these new uses for MRI and recommend it more frequently.”
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Category: Medical Equipment, Medical Imaging —