Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital gets first 3D heart scanner

Nov 6 2009 by Liza Williams, Liverpool Daily Post

A LIVERPOOL hospital has become the first in Britain to use a new 3-D heart scanner.

The technology, now on offer at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, in Broadgreen, is so new it was only cleared by the US authorities three weeks ago.

The equipment, called the Carto 3, will reduce the time it takes to operate on people with heart arrhythmias.

The condition means sufferers’ hearts do not beat regularly.

A procedure called ablation therapy is used to treat the most common type of arrhythmia, Atrial Fibrillation (AF).

Currently, doctors rely on X- rays and the operation takes around four hours.

Dr Dhiraj Gupta, Consultant Cardiac Physiologist at the hospital, says the time can now be halved: “We have carried out four procedures so far and it has taken around 2½ hours or less.

“Once we are used to it, I think we can regularly get it down to two.

“We currently carry out 300 procedures a year, and we hope to increase this by 50% with this new equipment.”

Without the scanner the operation is less precise and has around a 60-70% success rate.

Dr Gupta hopes this will now jump to more than 90%: “At the moment, one in three patients have to have the procedure repeated; we hope this will be reduced significantly because the equipment makes it so much more accurate.