Coming back to earth.
Frank Rademakers, MD, of University Hospitals (Leuven, Belgium), in a session titled “Imaging: The Focus of Clinical Cardiology for Years to Come,” told cardiologists: “It is time to start focusing again, not on what we can image, but on what we need to image to improve patient diagnosis and outcome.”
New techniques are welcome and dearly needed in many areas, he said, “but we have to create evidence showing an incremental value above existing techniques before including them in everyday practice.”
Rademakers said cardiologists need to recognize a new subspecialty, the “cardiovascular imager,” to integrate the waves of information coming from various techniques into a consistent answer to the clinicians.
“This requires broad consensus-building among the different modalities and specialties and much more research into the area, but it is necessary to translate today’s expanding imaging capabilities into a benefit for the cardiovascular patient,” he said.
Meanwhile the drumbeat from industry continued during the ESC congress, with more announcements of even newer capabilities.
