Page 21 - An Innovation Spirit ...

Twin state-of-the-
art CT scanners
have allowed the
Peter Munk Cardiac
Centre to “rapidly put
cutting-edge research
protocols into clinical
care as soon as they
are validated,” says
Dr. Narinder Paul.
He calls it a “huge”
advancement in the
study and care of
patients with heart
disease.
partnership with the JDMI and
the centre that aims to make
imaging procedures more “patient
friendly.”
This is what a patient with a
possible heart condition can
expect to experience as part of
the joint CT imaging project:
The patient undergoes a CT scan,
during which the dye injected
into a vein will go to wherever the
blood goes – if there’s a restriction Lawrence White, Radiologist-in-
to blood going into a certain area,
that dye will not highlight as well
as it would in areas where there
is no restriction. The image data
then goes to a powerful computer
and a software program, where
the heart can be turned in three
dimensions to look at every vessel,
no matter how small – both in and
around the heart. This determines
how blood is flowing into that
area, thus seeing if there’s any
disease, the extent of the disease
and whether it requires any
intervention.
“These new scanners are
Winter 2016
pushing the envelope of how
quickly we are able to capture
an anatomic picture of the
human body, and that’s of critical
importance in cardiac imaging.
Imagine the heart as a piece
of muscle beating and moving
rapidly in three dimensions,
and the inherent challenges in
capturing anatomic details of this
complex anatomic structure in a
single snapshot in time,” says Dr.
Chief of the Joint Department of
Medical Imaging, a joint program
of radiology at Mount Sinai
Hospital, the University Health
Network and Women’s College
Hospital.
“When trying to assess
something as small as the
coronary arteries, the vessels that imaging?
supply blood to the heart muscle,
to be able to see and assess these
structures you need a certain
amount of resolution to your
images; they need to be sharp and
accurate. These new machines are
able to give much greater accuracy
and speed, so you can assess
things now you absolutely couldn’t
do five years ago,” says Dr. White.
Dr. Paul adds: “With a cardiac
CT, because patients may be
nervous, the heart rate can be
quite fast. Therefore, we often
have to temporarily slow the heart
down to 60 beats per minute
using medication. With these
new machines, because the X-ray
tube and detector spin that much
faster, the heart rate can be as
high as 80 beats per minute, and
we can still obtain wonderful
images at a fraction of the
radiation dose that is used in older solutions are you’re looking for;
CT scan units.”
So where does the future lie for
Toshiba of Canada, for one, is
focusing on “volume” scanners –
ones that capture 3-D and even
4-D images that cover more area
and in less time than conventional
scanners, meaning less radiation
exposure and quicker results, says
Mr. Dettmann.
But the company is also looking
at preparing for future health-care
needs, and that’s where important
medical partnerships –
such as the one with the Joint
Department of Medical Imaging
and the Peter Munk Cardiac
Centre – come into play, he says,
adding that there currently are
no plans to put this research-to-
clinical platform anywhere but the
PMCC.
“What you need is the physicians
telling you: what the headaches
are you have now; what the
what things we need to do in
five to 10 years; and what kinds
of diseases are increasing,” Mr.
Dettmann says. “Definitely, heart
disease is one of the top two
diseases in the world [along with
cancer], so having a solution to
the variety of heart diseases, and
developing them together with
clinicians, is a very important part
of our business.”
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