Test that spots if it really is a heart attack

Arevolutionary new bedside scanner takes just three minutes to detect if someone may have had a heart attack; current tests can take hours. the battery-powered device can tell doctors almost instantly if a patient’s chest pain is due to a serious cardiac issue, such as a heart attack or angina (chest pain caused by partially blocked blood vessels), or unrelated to the heart.

it could spare hundreds of thousands of patients a year with chest pain the worry of waiting for hours in hospital to find out if they’ve suffered a heart scare.

Currently, when a patient goes to hospital with chest pain, doctors presume they have had a heart attack until proved otherwise.

this means carrying out repeat electrocardiograms — a measure of the heart’s electrical activity — and taking blood samples to check for raised levels of a protein called troponin.

this is released by heart muscle damaged by a shortage of oxygen thanks to a clot shutting off its blood supply. But troponin levels can take up to 12 hours or more to increase after a heart attack — which means patients must stay in hospital for tests.

according to nHS research body the york Health economics Consortium, around 1.3 million people a year in the uK go to hospital with chest pain.

More than 800,000 of these cases turn out to be nothing to do with the heart. Most are instead due to a severe form of acid reflux.

Such patients currently take up vital resources in busy a& e departments, so the new bedside scanner could free up doctors and nurses to treat more seriously ill patients.

the vitalscan device relies on magnetocardiography — a technology first developed in the Seventies to study the heart in great detail.

anything that has lots of electrical activity, such as the heart, also generates a magnetic field.

tiny sensors, called magnetometers, pick up signals from the magnetic field. these can be severely distorted if heart cells are diseased or dying owing to a lack of oxygen — as in the case of a heart attack.

the problem is that most scanners are bulky machines, costing in excess of £1million each; they also cannot be moved and need highly-trained technicians to operate them.

as a result, their use has mainly been confined to scientific research, rather than everyday medicine.

the vitalscan is a miniaturised version and can be moved around the hospital on a trolley. it has a long flexible ‘arm’, on the end of which is a scanner the size of a computer screen. this is placed about an inch above the patient’s bare chest as they lie flat.

the scanner relays findings to a computer, which displays them in the form of a ‘map’, where oxygen- starved cells are highlighted in vivid colours.

Doctors also get a score indicating how likely it is that chest pain is due to heart problems. the score ranges from zero, where arteries are perfectly healthy, to one — which means they are completely blocked.

if the score is low, patients can be sent home or told to see their GP. if it’s high, eCGs and troponin tests are carried out to confirm if it’s the result of a heart attack. THe

£100,000 machine is being marketed by a British company, Creavo Medical technologies ltd, based on initial developments by scientists at leeds university.

it is halfway through trials at four nHS hospitals in leicester, nottingham, Sheffield and Bristol, where doctors aim to use it on around 750 patients to test its accuracy. the trials are expected to be completed later this year.

Martin Cowie, a professor of cardiology at imperial College london, said the scanner was potentially useful. But he stressed it needed to be tested on thousands of patients — rather than hundreds — before it could be routinely used to rule out heart attacks.

‘this new technology is an interesting development, but needs to be further evaluated,’ he said.