A recently introduced atherectomy catheter offers a new class of device. It offers the advantages of two cutting tips on the same catheter, the ability to bore through all types of lesions, built-in embolic protection, and the ability to aspirate thrombus.

Despite the industry’s movement toward vendor neutral solutions, gaps remain in connectivity between PACS, cardiovascular information systems (CVIS), cardiac devices, monitors, other departments, and with hospital information systems. To fill the gaps where interoperability is an issue, some hospitals have found the best solution is writing their own programming.

Editor’s note: Dr. Samady is an associate professor of medicine, division of cardiology,
Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta. He wrote the following commentary on his experience with FFR and its impact on patient care.

Fractional flow reserve (FFR) is starting to change cardiologists’ minds about how to treat patients since the release of two-year results from the FAME (FFR vs. Angiography in Multivessel Evaluation) trial at Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) 2009. It showed FFR lowers costs by reducing the number of stents and produces better patient outcomes.


In today’s market, many vendors have very good cardiovascular picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). One needs to only hit the exhibit floor for a short time at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) or the American College of Cardiology (ACC) before it becomes apparent that there is a myriad of systems available right now that are excellent and fairly user friendly.

PicomSR, ScImage's portable structured reporting suite for echocardiography, offers embedded wall motion scoring. The reporting suite's other tools include structured reporting for nuclear medicine and the cardiac cath lab.

PicomWeb is a light, zero-footprint, content delivery mechanism for diagnostic images and related documents is based on Adobe Flash technology. It allows interactive ECG waveforms viewing that are rendered on the fly. This allows clinicians to modify the speed and gain of the tracing for a more precise view of the ECG morphology, whether the user is investigating from a PC or a smart phone.

February 9, 2010 - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it is starting a program designed to reduce unnecessary medical radiation exposure that will focus on three types of imaging procedures: computed tomography (CT), nuclear medicine and fluoroscopy. The FDA considers those procedures the greatest contributors to total U.S.

February 9, 2010 – The FDA approved CRESTOR (rosuvastatin calcium) to reduce the risk of stroke, myocardial infarction and arterial revascularization procedures in individuals without clinically evident coronary heart disease.

February 9, 2010 – Researchers are developing technology that they hope will one day prevent thrombus formation on cardiovascular devices without the use of anticoagulation drugs.

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