Brian Ghoshhajra, MD, MBA, division chief, cardiovascular imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of radiology, Harvard Medical School, and a board member of the Society of cardiovascular Computed Tomography (SCCT), explains the rapidly expanding interest in cardiac computed tomography (CT) under the new chest pain evaluation guidelines.

Randall Thompson, MD, immediate past president of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology, said the group had issues with the document's elevation of cardiac CT and FFR-CT. 

Eric Williamson, MD, president of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography (SCCT) and professor of radiology at Mayo Clinic, explains the rapid rise of interest in cardiac CT imaging following its inclusion as a top recommendation in the ACC 2021 Chest Pain Evaluation Guidelines.

CT-FFR, which recently got a boost from the 2021 AHA/ACC chest pain guidelines, could play a key role for clinicians hoping to screen TAVR patients for coronary heart disease. 

Leslee Shaw, PhD, director of The Blavatnik Family Women’s Health Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, explains how cardiac computed tomography (CT) can be used to assess coronary plaques.

HeartFlow’s non-invasive cardiac computed tomography derived fractional flow reserve (FFR-CT) technology enables FFR values for the entire coronary tree of a patient using just a CT scan. This can show the significance of any coronary plaque lesions and if a patient needs to be sent to the cath lab for revascularization, or if they can be treated medically.

"A CT-first strategy allows physicians to provide relevant findings without the need for an invasive procedure," one radiologist explained. 

Duly Health and Care in suburban Chicago recently opened a new outpatient cardiac evaluation center equipped with a dedicated cardiac CT system, which will likely be a new business model that will be seen more in the coming years.