Twice-Olympic gold rowing medallist, James Cracknell, recently opened the UK’s first ever dedicated cardiac CT service and experienced a “virtual reality tour” of the heart via a new sophisticated Siemens cardiac CT scanner at the UK’s leading cardiothoracic centre, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust (RB&H). This unique cardiac scanning service, based at Royal Brompton Hospital, will help fight the battle against coronary heart disease.
Service boosts cardiac care
The new high tech 64-slice Siemens Somatom Sensation 64 Cardiac CT scanner has the capacity to diagnose early coronary heart disease and is set to revolutionise the way cardiac patients are investigated. With this new service, over 4,000 patients from around the UK will benefit every year – dramatically reducing waiting times for heart disease diagnosis and treatment. The new scanner works by capturing 200 images of the heart every second. This enables the motion of the heart to technically be “frozen” in a series of images which generate much greater detail than other diagnostic tests.