NASA TECHNOLOGY WORKS WITH THE HEART
Doctors, who diagnose and monitor treatments for hardening of the arteries in its early stages, even before strokes and heart attacks occur, are being helped by NASA Space technology. Arteriole Vision software is being used in hospitals and by doctors across the country. Also used is a standard-size, painless, non-invasive ultrasound examination of the carotid artery, which carries blood from the heart to the brain. The plaque and blood flow within the artery is measured by the standard carotid ultrasound. The ultrasound used along with software, measures the thickness of the inner two layers of the carotid artery-the intima and media.
The Arterio Vision software has been patented by Technologies International, Inc. (MTI) of Palm Desert, California. The earliest evidence of atherosclerosis or “hardening of the arteries” is by arterial thickening. It is the beginning stage of a disease process that leads to heart disease and stroke. This carotid intima media thickness (CIMT) measurement can be used by doctor to calculate the age of the patients arteries. It doesn’t necessarily match the patient’s calendar age. “You may look and feel one way on the outside, but your arteries actually could be much older than one realizes.” said Howard N. Hodis of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. “Once patients see how thick their arteries are, there is much more incentive to them to change their lifestyle with dietary modification and exercise”, he said “Physicians also can use the test to monitor and change current medications. The Arterio Vision CIMT procedure is the new diagnostic tool that has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For fifteen years, Robert Selzer, MTI chief engineer. worked in the JPL’s Image Processing Laboratory, where the technology was developed that ultimately led to the software used in Arterio Vision. “This is such a precise method of examining the carotid artery. It distinguishes between 256 shades of gray at a sub-pixel level”, Selzer said, “You need that kind of detail to help catch heart disease as early as you can, often before there are any outward symptoms.”
During the test, the patient reclines on an examination table while a technician applies gel to the neck to image the carotid arteries which are located on both sides of the neck near the skin’s surface. An ultrasound machine used by the technician follows a patented procedure to capture specific images of the carotid artery wall. The physician using the Arterio Vision software generates a CIMT measurement and a report that identifies the patient’s risk profile when compared to people of the same age and gender. Created in 1966, the JPL’s Image Processing Laboratory was created to receive and make sense of spacecraft imagery. The NASA-invented Video Imaging Communication and Retrieval software has been used in the lab to process pictures from numerous space missions, including Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and their Voyagers. The imagery software has greater accuracy and improved knowledge of our solar system because of periodic upgrades. Gary F. Thompson, chairman and chief executive officer of MTI, says “the test is near and dear to his heart-literally and figuratively.” I was the first male in my family to reach 50, so I decided to celebrate by running the Los Angeles marathon, but it had a heart attack halfway through it and couldn’t finish.” Thompson said.
“None of the non-invasive tests that I had prior to the marathon detected my silent hart disease, and I knew there had to be something better out there.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Mars News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
