Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale is the first facility in South Florida to have partnered with the medical technology company HeartFlow in Redwood City, CA to offer patients fractional flow reserve computed tomography (FFR-CT) of the heart.
Cardiac CT is a non-invasive test acquired with very little radiation in less than ten seconds in this state-of-the-art 256 slice CT scanner that generates thousands of 3-D images of the heart. FFR-CT is an FDA- approved technology allowing doctors to determine whether blockage areas in the coronary arteries are depriving the heart of blood flow that can lead to a heart attack and/or sudden death. FFR-CT analysis is performed by utilizing the patient’s cardiac CT scan when artery blockage is identified in a cardiac CT scan. Additional testing on the patient is not required.
"Cardiac CT is a great study for seeing the anatomy of the heart including the coronary arteries," said Claudio Smuclovisky, M.D., director of Holy Cross Hospital’s Radiology Cardiovascular Imaging. "The study is 99 percent accurate in excluding significant coronary artery disease. In patients who do have potentially significant coronary artery disease, the piece of the puzzle that was missing was not knowing whether there was functionally decreased blood flow to the heart muscle that could lead to a heart attack. FFR-CT is an exciting new capability that is able to, in most cases, demonstrate whether the blockage in the arteries is seriously affecting blood flow to the heart muscle.”
The results of FFR-CT also help direct the cardiologist to the area of blockage during invasive coronary angiography. There are more than 125 published scientific papers supporting FFR-CT. Recent publications demonstrate that the combination of cardiac CT plus FFR-CT was better than other non-invasive tests and avoided unnecessary invasive coronary angiography in 61 percent of the patients. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has recently approved payment for FFR-CT.
Cardiac CT is a non-invasive test acquired with very little radiation in less than ten seconds in this state-of-the-art 256 slice CT scanner that generates thousands of 3-D images of the heart. FFR-CT is an FDA- approved technology allowing doctors to determine whether blockage areas in the coronary arteries are depriving the heart of blood flow that can lead to a heart attack and/or sudden death. FFR-CT analysis is performed by utilizing the patient’s cardiac CT scan when artery blockage is identified in a cardiac CT scan. Additional testing on the patient is not required.
