THURSDAY, Jan. 30, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology can find small areas of heart muscle death that can't be detected by a commonly used nuclear imaging technique.
An American study in the Feb. 1 issue of The Lancet says the ability to detect those small areas of muscle cell death, known as infarcts, may help prevent more severe heart problems down the road.
The study was done by researchers at Duke University Medical Center and Northwestern University Medical School. It included 91 people with known or suspected coronary artery disease.
They were examined using cardiac MRI and the traditional nuclear imaging technique called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).
The study found that SPECT was able to detect only 53 percent of the microinfarcts identified by cardiac MRI. It also found that 13 percent of the people with microinfarcts were shown to have none when SPECT alone was used to examine them.
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