3-Dimension Cardiovascular Cartography, an easier way to detect heart ailments

With the rising burden of cardiac patients in India due to their lifestyle, medical experts have suggested newly introduced 3-Dimension Cardiovascular Cartography (3D-CCG) as the easiest way to detect any cardiac ailment.

Being a non-invasive procedure, Cardiovascular 3D cartography is a technique for early detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) and to evaluate the status of heart and its circulatory system to help plan further treatment.

According to the doctors, the test is useful in detecting several chest related problem and also assess treatment effectiveness.

Explaining the procedure, S.S Sibia, a cardic expert associated with Sibia Medical Center said: "CCG is a non-invasive procedure. Under this, the patient is wired to Haemoseis device using 12 electrodes and a highly sensitive transducer. In less than five minutes, recordings are made for 256 heartbeats and a high-speed computer calculates the result within 15 minutes."

"The doctor gets data that was earlier not possible, through non-invasive methods. The records obtained during the procedure include details such as the amount of blood pumped for every beat of the heart, how much blood is reaching the heart muscle, relative oxygen demand, and much more," said Sibia.

Cardiac experts have also said that the CCG's positive predictive accuracy is over 90 percent and negative accuracy over 80 percent for detecting heart disease.

"It differs from angiography as angiography only measures the quantity of blockages in the heart's blood vessels but CCG informs about the amount of blood reaching the heart muscle," said Sibia.

Harpreet Kaur, who has been performing CCG for months now, said in other processes such as angiograpy does not exactly tell how much the body has compensated itself for the decrease in blood flow caused by the blockages, while the CCG clearly mentions the flow of blood reaching the heart muscles.

"This is why we often see patients with 99 percent blocks moving around without chest pain or heart attack. It is gradually being realized that blood flow to the heart muscle is all that matters and not the blockages.

"Blockages in the arteries contribute to only 70 to 80 per cent of the reasons for the reduced blood flow," she said, adding that it is decreased flow to the heart muscle that causes a heart attack, usually with a thrombus and not blockages in arteries, and the two do not always go hand in hand."