Health Imaging & IT - October 2007 - (Page 44) special section: Inside Cardiac Imaging coming soon Both CT and MR are going to be dominant technologies in cardiovascular imaging, says Albert. While vendors are working on reducing the radiation exposure involved in CT, “I still think MR has the potential to do all of these things and do them more safely.” MR has to achieve higher resolution coronary imaging, he says, but “that’s something that’s being worked on aggressively. Once that hurdle is overcome, you’ve really got MR doing a lot, if not everything, CT was doing without the inherent risks of CT.” Albert agrees that MR will be better than CT in the future. Since age is the most common predictor of coronary calcification, the Baby Boomers may not be the best population for CT. Plus, anyone with kidney problems will have a problem with the contrast required for CT. Both technologies need further development, says Min. “64-slice is going to be the workhorse for the next 4 to 6 years. There are definitely going to be advances in spatial resolution, number of detectors, maybe even a complete rehaul of engineering design. But, the next true generation of scanners will come in 5 to 7 years, not 3 to 5.” A bigger issue than technological improvements might be an increasing need to image patients. “The number of patients far exceeds the number of individuals trained to evaluate the images,” says Stillman. Fortunately, interest in education is growing. 44 O C T O B E R 2 0 07 | Health Imaging & IT HealthImaging.com http://www.emageon.com http://HealthImaging.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.