VIDEO: Multimodality imaging helps cardiologists manage heart failure patients—with an assist from AI

There has been a wide movement toward integrated, multimodality imaging programs that follow evidence-based guidelines to pick the right test for specific clinical questions. This trend has been a hot topic of discussion at cardiac imaging subspecialty conferences where sessions include a lot more information on the roles of other modalities. 

Heart failure is one of the most common diagnoses in cardiology, and echocardiography, cardiac MRI, cardiac CT and nuclear imaging all play different roles depending on the clinical questions being asked.

Purvi Parwani, MD, director of echocardiography for Loma Linda University Medical Center, spoke on heart failure imaging guidelines and the rising use of mixed multimodality imaging during a session at the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) 2023 conference in June. She spoke with Cardiovascular Business about the ongoing trend.

"In the United States, heart failure readmissions play an important role in the healthcare economics, and we lose a lot of dollars when these patients come back. So it is really important that when it comes to the diagnostic part of why that patient has heart failure that we find the the underlying cause. Now ... we are realizing that instead of having a blanket heart failure diagnosis, we can actually phenotype those patients very well using multimodality imaging," Parwani explained.