November
6,
2007 -- 9:48 EST
The Super X-Ray
On Halloween night, Turner Classic Movies ran
a Karloff-a-thon and I got to see a favorite sci-fi flick from my nerdy
8th grade years: "The
Invisible Ray" -- a cautionary
tale in which an unknown ray, emanating from a meteor that crashed
in Africa long ago, was able to melt and destroy rocks and statues,
yet also cure blindness and countless other diseases -- all, of course,
at the expense
of making
Boris Karloff
glow in the dark and instantly kill anyone he touches ("Pushing
Daisies"
anyone?).
So it was with amazement that, when I logged onto the
news yesterday, I saw headlines everywhere proclaiming a medical
breakthrough: the "Super
X-Ray".
We had just posted an article about
the results of the CorE 64 study, presented at the annual
American Heart Association Scientific
Sessions in Orlando by the investigators at Johns Hopkins.
The goal was to compare the diagnostic accuracy of 64-slice CT angiography
with the current "gold standard" of invasive cardiac catheterization
in the detection of coronary artery disease. The
results were excellent -- you can read more about the study in our
article, "64-Slice
CT Heart Scan Gets High Marks As Test for Blocked Arteries."
It quickly became clear that all the articles about the
"Super X-Ray" were in fact about the CorE 64 study. In fact, most
of the articles were feeds from the AP
article by Marilynn Marchione.
I've discussed with cardiologists from the Society
of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography the fact that this technology,
which has been around for a few years now, needed a name. Sometimes
it's called Multislice
CT (CT
stands for "computed tomography") or Multidetector CT or Cardiac
CT or CT Angiography, CTA and so on. And there are generations
from 16-slice to the current 64-slice and coming soon at your neighborhood
imaging center, the 256-slice scanner.
But now the retail press has
taken care of that: presenting the "Super X-Ray". I'll take two,
please.
By the way, I'll be writing more on this subject -- because
there are some serious inaccuracies in the AP article, for example,
stating that Multislice CT scans "deliver 10 times more
radiation to the patient than a standard
angiogram". (Who wouldn't glow after one of those?) There
are a number of studies that show the range of radiation doses to
be anywhere from the same to about twice as much, depending on who
does the study, what equipment is used and whether newer techniques
such as gating and phasing are used (significantly reducing the radiation
dose).
Even at its high end, the radiation exposure from CTA
is similar or less than what the patient gets in a typical nuclear
stress test -- a widely-used test that many imaging specialists feel
will be replaced by CTA.
For more, and more accurate information and interviews
with experts about this and other imaging technologies, visit Angioplasty.Org's
Imaging Center.
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