Interventional thought leaders at an American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting shared their predictions about the cutting-edge technologies emerging today that will become commonplace in the cath lab of the future.

New appropriate use expert consensus documents developed by the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) provide guidance on treating the most common form of peripheral artery disease (PAD), namely blockages that affect arteries above the knee.

June 16, 2014 — Children with heart disease are exposed to low levels of radiation during X-rays, which do not significantly raise their lifetime cancer risk. However, children who undergo repeated complex imaging tests that deliver higher doses of radiation may have a slightly increased lifetime risk of cancer, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The findings, published June 9 in the American Heart Association (AHA) journal Circulation, represent the largest study of cumulative radiation doses in children with heart disease and associated predictions of lifetime cancer risk.

Ischemic heart disease, a narrowing of the arteries supplying blood to the heart, is a leading cause of death throughout the world. A hybrid molecular imaging technique called positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance (PET/MR) imaging, which tells doctors vital information about cardiac and arterial function, has been found to be an effective molecular imaging tool for detecting coronary artery disease (CAD), say researchers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging’s 2014 Annual Meeting (SNMMI).