cardiac CT Archives - Page 2 of 2

A new Radiology Journal study found that combining Triple-rule-out CT (TRO CT) with Late Contrast Enhancement CT (LCE CT) significantly improves acute chest pain diagnosis.

Background – It’s traditionally been challenging to diagnose patients with acute chest pain and mild troponin rise, as TRO CT is effective for several key diagnoses (coronary artery disease, acute aortic syndrome, pulmonary embolism) but can’t identify nonvascular causes of myocardial injury.

The Study – The researchers examined 84 troponin-positive patients with acute chest pain using TRO CT, and then performed LCE CT exams on the 42 patients who had negative/inconclusive results.

The Results – The added LCE CT exams revealed positive/conclusive findings in 34 of the 42 previously-negative/inconclusive patients (including 22 w/ myocarditis), improving overall diagnostic rates from 50% to 90% (from 42/84 to 76/84).

The Takeaway – This new TRO CT + LCE CT protocol could make cardiac CT a “one-stop shop” for diagnosing acute chest pain, eliminating the need for follow-up MRI exams and allowing faster diagnoses. That’s especially notable considering that CT is already recommended for patients with low-risk acute chest pain (to exclude CAD) and was recently proposed as a gatekeeper for invasive coronary angiography.

UCSF is now using AI to automatically screen all of its routine non-contrast chest CTs for elevated coronary artery calcium scores (CAC scores), representing a major milestone for an AI use case that was previously limited to academic studies and future business strategies.

UCSF’s Deployment – UCSF becomes the first medical center to deploy the end-to-end AI CAC scoring system that it developed with Stanford and Bunkerhill Health earlier this year. The new system automatically identifies elevated CAC scores in non-gated / non-contrast chest CTs, creating an “opportunistic screening pathway” that allows UCSF physicians to identify high-CAC patients and get them into treatment.

Why This is a Big Deal – Over 20m chest CTs are performed in the U.S. annually and each of those scans contains insights into patients’ cardiac health. However, an AI model like this would be required to extract cardiac data from the majority of CT scans (CAC isn’t visible to humans in non-gated CTs) and efficiently interpret them (there’s far too many images). This AI system’s path from academic research to clinical deployment seems like a big deal too.

The Commercial Impact – Most health systems don’t have the AI firepower of Stanford and UCSF, but they certainly produce plenty of chest CTs and should want to identify more high-risk patients while treatable (especially if they’re also risk holders). Meanwhile, there’s growing commercial efforts from companies like Cleerly and Nanox.AI to create opportunistic CAC screening pathways for all these health systems that can’t develop their own CAC AI workflows (or prefer not to).

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