Every year, 20,000 people in Sweden suffer from acute heart attacks. Half of them have not even experienced any symptoms. And one-quarter of them die within a month.
“But it doesn’t have to be like this,” says Professor Anders Persson, Director of the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV) at Linköping University.
He has decided to reverse the curve for our most common cause of death.
World-leading visualisation
CMIV is the world leader in visualisation of the heart and other organs in the body. When the Center was founded in 2003, Anders Persson began to examine the coronary arteries by using the new X-ray method computed tomography imaging. He worked with cardiologists at the University Hospital. Few others believed in the method.
“We were among the first in the world to do this, and many were against us. We were told ‘it’s just nonsense’. The reason was probably that there was no scientific basis for what the new method could do,” says Anders Persson.
However, it turned out that the clinical benefit was great. A computed tomography examination (CT scan) only takes a few minutes for the patient and does not require entry into the blood vessels. Critics were silenced and in 2019 new European guidelines were presented based on CMIV’s work. These established that CT scans should to a much greater extent be the first choice when investigating coronary artery disease.
By then, heart research at CMIV had evolved to be about much more than coronary arteries.
“Now we are the only ones in the world to look at the entire heart function and blood flow using CT scans.”
High resolution and low radiation dose
Currently, a so-called photon counting computer tomograph is used for this. One of the first three in the world was placed at CMIV a few years ago. It can take very high resolution images with a low radiation dose. A whole heartbeat equals around 3,000 images, and one short examination will provide an incredible amount of data.
The collected image information is then further processed by high-speed computers, where blood flow can be simulated and quantified using artificial intelligence, among other things. In the future, information on the patient's DNA and other data collected as part of the world's longest follow-up of cardiac patients (the register established when CMIV began to examine coronary arteries) can be added. Together, all of this can provide information to assess the patient’s condition at an acute stage and predict risks more effectively than before. Who is healthy, who needs surgery, who needs blood thinners for atrial fibrillation? How should a mechanical heart valve be placed to obtain optimal effect?
“Our vision is to find those who need treatment, and also to understand exactly what kind of treatment they need, in time,” says Anders Persson.
Larger clinical studies are required
He and his research team want doctors around the world to use the CMIV method. But first, the solution needs to be further developed, and this is where they run into problems. It is difficult to get funding from the traditional research funders to take the step from successful research project to actual use in everyday healthcare.
Anders Persson explains which pieces of the puzzle are missing:
“We depend on research radiographers and research engineers to be able to do the examinations required for the next step. We also need funds for conducting larger clinical studies, so that the technology can be approved for use in healthcare.”
To try to solve this, LiU has chosen this research as one of the priority areas for which the university should actively seek to receive private donations. With funding from a private donor, researchers often have a freedom that is difficult to achieve in other ways.
If successful, this can help many, many people and save large sums of money in healthcare.
Collaboration in the hospital environment
Anders Persson believes that an important factor behind CMIV’s success is that they work across borders.
“There aren’t many centres in the world that are designed like this. Here at CMIV, technical and medical researchers sit together, in the hospital environment. This gives us much greater opportunities to identify and solve problems that really make a clinical difference.
Translation: Anneli Mosell
