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Biotech / Medical : IMAT - ultrafast tomography for coronary artery disease -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MJ who wrote (2607)	7/16/1998 8:25:00 AM
From: Brian Moloney	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3725

Actually the controversy about stress tests is one of the things that is polarizing the medical community. Stress tests will not be gone; their niche will be in a different place. The Heart-Lung Institute's study should go a long way toward developing a protocol to determine who would benefit from EBCT and who would benefit from a treadmill. Many of my patients get a treadmill after their scan. The marketing approach should be that by the time a stress test is positive, it is time for some sort of invasive intervention. Ultrafast can detect disease long before one gets that far down the road.

To: MJ who wrote (2607)	7/16/1998 1:14:00 PM
From: Donna L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3725

I am new to Silicon and long on IMAT so I hope you don't mind my comments. IMAT technology is not the same as stress testing and should not be intended to replace it at this point in time given that it has no "functional" indicators. There are numerous types of blockages, plaques and lesions which contribute to coronary disease. Not all of them are calcium based and therefore are not quantifiable using the scanner as it is currently used. Additionally, a person may have a blockage which is not "functionally" significant. This is important because if it isn't causing symptoms or placing the person at risk when the the myocardial oxygen demand is increased (such as with exercise), the person doesn't necessarily need to go jumping into a high risk interventional procedure. On the flip side, there are some lesions which appear "small" but cause huge functional problems for various reasons. All cardiovascular disease, regardless of it's etiology should be carefully monitored, assessed and treated by a qualified physician; however, it is not prudent to ignore functional ability and cardiovascular tolerance when evaluating heart disease. And Maxine, thank you for your notes from the annual shareholder meeting. They bolstered my little investor spirit when it was lagging. EOM