How New Heart-Scanning Technology Could Save Your Life

Not surprisingly then, the new cardiac scans are helping to fuel a more aggressive focus on prevention. If a cardiac scan shows your doctor that you have mild coronary artery disease, then, in addition to trying to get your LDL cholesterol level under 70 mg/dL, he or she is probably going to put you on a daily aspirin regimen and make sure your blood pressure is nice and low. "Conversely," says Cannon, "if you have a scan and you're normal, you don't have to start taking five different medications."

Meanwhile, there is still an issue of professional turf left to resolve. High-tech imaging--particularly CT scanning--has long been the purview of radiologists, many of whom don't take kindly to cardiologists encroaching on their territory. After all, it has happened before. Radiologists used to perform lots of cardiac catheterizations but have pretty much given up that technique to heart specialists, in large part because they were simply outnumbered. As for who is best at reading cardiac CT scans, cardiologists argue that they have a better understanding of the heart's anatomy and function, while radiologists point out that the heart is not the only organ that shows up on the images and needs to be evaluated. Some hospitals have split the difference, decreeing that a cardiologist and a radiologist should analyze each cardiac scan.

No one expects any of these concerns to hold the field back for long. Noninvasive imaging has the potential to radically alter the way physicians diagnose and monitor heart disease. "The whole paradigm for us has been that you don't get that kind of information unless you stick things into people," says Duke University's Douglas. But as cardiac scanners become more powerful and their diagnoses more definitive, sticking probes into people is going to sound less and less like modern medicine--and more like voodoo. --With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/Chicago

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