From the April 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“[CVIS] is almost a requirement now with all of the reporting that has to be done,” says Cris Bennett, a clinical analyst at MD Buyline. “All of the cath lab imaging data is stored in the CVIS, but it also reports stents and balloon pops and anything else they are going to use in a cath lab.”

Other CVIS solutions on the market include Philips CVIS and the Siemens Cardiovascular Imaging and Information Solution.


If a health care facility doesn’t have a dedicated CVIS, Bennett says it will embed the reporting into its PACS or any software in the radiology department that is compatible with HL7.

Promising research with micro-CT
Aarhus University in Denmark has developed a new contrast-enhanced micro-CT imaging technique that could one day produce 3-D reproductions of the cardiac conduction system, which generates the electrical signal that drives the heartbeat.

An article published in Scientific Reports in September stated that this technique allows for much higher spatial resolution than a conventional CT scanner. That will provide researchers with a better view of the cardiac conduction system and allow them to map the orientation of the cellular chains within the heart muscles that dictate the velocity and pathway of the electrical signal.

“Integrating these two pieces of structural information into mathematical simulations of the heart’s electrical activation can allow us to predict areas prone to arrhythmias and potentially find new targets for ablation therapy,” says Robert Stephenson, Marie Currie fellow at the university.

Knowing the 3-D disposition of the specialized cardiac conduction system can help surgeons with valve prosthesis implantation. It’s imperative that the prosthesis does not compress the neighboring specialized cells of the cardiac conduction system.

Currently, this technique is only performed on deceased patients for research purposes because the X-ray dose required to produce images of this quality is too high for clinical application. However, as CT technology improves, this could change.

Stephenson and his team have recently expanded the technique to explore the 3-D disposition of the cardiac conduction system of congenitally malformed human hearts. That information will help guide corrective surgery.

“We have also used the high resolution micro-CT data to produce 3-D prints of these hearts,” he says. “Such prints have potential implications in surgical planning and practice, medical education and even patient consultations.”

April 2018 Magazine

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