Somotom Sensation Cardiac

We, at the Viram Hospital and Heart Care are proud to present the Sensation Cardiac, a Computerised Tomography Scanner that has been built to take Medical Scanning to the next level. Now, your patients need not go for a cumbersome in-patient procedure of staying in the Hospital that comes with a conventional Angiogram procedure.

Sensation Cardiac is high end CT scan taking about 42 slices per second, each as small as 0.25 mm thick & reconstructing the entire coronary arteries & detecting blocks at the earliest stage. The scanner costs close to a Million US dollars & has become the investigation of choice for screening coronary angiograms by international doctors. Various studies have shown it to have a high sensitivity of over 95%, a specificity of over 85% & a negative predictive value of over 97%. This means that a normal CT Coronary Angiogram most certainly means the person has no blocks & need not fear of suffering from a heart attack. It also means that the CT Coronary Angiogram can pick up the blocks in early stages. The other great advantage is that it can help determine the nature of block (soft plaques or hard plaques, with calcium). This enables your doctor to decide the need for intervention like Coronary Angioplasty or By-pass surgery. Before undertaking these procedures, you doctor may wish to perform the conventional cath lab angiogram too.

The patient needs to spend less than half-hour at the hospital. The test by itself takes about 5 mins to perform.  The patient can come in either on an empty stomach or about 2 hours after a meal. He should take all the existing medications. If he has a high heart rate, doctors at the hospital will administer medications to bring it below 90 beats per min. A intravenous contrast is injected (no catheters, no groin punctures, no immobilization of the limbs, no hospitalization, no risks) & the patient should hold the breath for about 20 seconds to complete the test.