BACKGROUND Severe obesity is asscociated with an increased risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) but non-invasive cardiac imaging modalities have important technical limits. CASE PRESENTATION We report a case of a 58-year old patient with suspected CAD and severely elevated BMI of 58 kg/m2. CONCLUSIONS Stress-CMR was able to non-invasively stratify risk with good imaging quality despite the...

UNLABELLED In July 2009, the Medical Advisory Secretariat (MAS) began work on Non-Invasive Cardiac Imaging Technologies for the Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), an evidence-based review of the literature surrounding different cardiac imaging modalities to ensure that appropriate technologies are accessed by patients suspected of having CAD. This project came about when the Health Ser...

History, clinical examinations, biomarkers, ECG criteria and risk scores are unreliable for the identification of patients who may be safely discharged early. The role of chest pain observation units (CPUs) is to identify, by using repeated clinical examinations, ECG and biomarker testing, those patients who require admission for invasive procedures. This may include provocative testing and, in...

The search for a parameter representing left ventricular relaxation from non-invasive and invasive diagnostic tools has been extensive, since heart failure (HF) with preserved ejection fraction (HF-pEF) is a global health problem. We explore here the feasibility using patient-specific cardiac computer modeling to capture diastolic parameters in patients suffering from different degrees of systo...

Cardiovascular diseases are a major health concern world-wide. Analysis of the cardiac motion is a standard technique for studying and understanding the etiology of heart disease such as ischemic heart disease. Ultrasound imaging is a very important and competitive medical diagnostic tool, due to its low cost, short acquisition time, and non-invasive nature. Echocardiography is a widely used ul...

Background CMR is the preeminent imaging technique to assess LV function and myocardial injury. With the advent of combined angiography / CMR suites, there is an opportunity to perform combined invasive hemodynamic evaluation and treatments further informed by CMR imaging. However, key considerations are safety issues in potentially unstable patients in the context of MR and X-ray hazards. Here...

Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death in the United Kingdom; however, most first presentations with chest pain to primary care have a non-cardiac cause. It is important to establish which patients’ symptoms are caused by obstructive coronary artery disease, so that these patients can be optimally managed to control angina and reduce mortality. To support clinical decision making, t...

A large amount of data has accumulated during the past 20 years demonstrating the value of exercise or pharmacologic stress planar and single-photon emission-computed tomographic (SPECT) perfusion imaging for risk stratification and prognostication in patients with suspected or known coronary artery disease (CAD) (1–14). The major goal of such noninvasive risk assessment is the identification o...

Background Coronary arterial wall imaging is a promising non-invasive tool for quantitative assessment of arterial remodeling. Conventional techniques mandate imaging during cardiac rest period as well as nulling the blood signal inside the arterial lumen in order to generate an appropriate lumen-wall contrast. These constraints limited the use of coronary wall imaging. Recently, phase-sensitiv...

The last twenty years have seen an explosive growth in cardiovascular disease research. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the characteristics of published research in the field of non-invasive cardiovascular imaging research from 1991-2011. Our aims were to determine: (1) the origin of the studies (international or from the U.S.) (2) differences in funding sources for U.S. publications a...