What is Clinical and Interventional Cardiology?

Clinical and interventional Cardiology is the diagnosis and treatment of conditions that affect the heart and surrounding blood vessels such as:
• Coronary Artery Disease - Medical Management of Vascular Diseases such as
• Carotid Artery Disease - Medical Management of congenital heart condition.

Often in clinical cardiology, more than one type of imaging procedure is used to evaluate patients for cardiac disease. Coronary angiography is the gold standard for diagnosis of coronary artery stenosis, magnetic resonance imaging is performed to determine gross anatomy, and SPECT is used to evaluate myocardial perfusion. However, image registration of the heart or its structures is very difficult because the heart is constantly in motion and because its orientation within the chest cavity may change with patient positioning. Thus, most of the work in cardiac registration is still in the research phase.

For example, accurate assessment of the extent and severity of coronary artery disease requires the integration of physiological information derived from SPECT perfusion images and anatomical information derived from coronary angiography. This integration can be performed by registering a 3D LV model representing myocardial perfusion with the patient's own 3D coronary artery tree and presenting both in a single unified display. The patient-specific 3D coronary arterial tree is obtained from a geometric reconstruction performed on simultaneously acquired, digital, biplane angiographic projections or from two single-plane projections acquired at different angles. The 3D myocardial surface can be generated using boundary detection or modeling techniques on the SPECT image.