The Los Altos, CA-based company received FDA clearance for its artificial intelligence-assisted One Click Cardiac Package MRI software to be used in cardiac exams.

Omar Ford

October 29, 2019

2 Min Read
HeartVista Brings Artificial Intelligence to Cardiac MRI
Pixabay

HeartVista is hoping to increase the use of CardiacMRI’s. To achieve this goal, the Los Altos, CA-based company has developed the One Click Cardiac Package MRI software, which recently received FDA clearance.

“It has been widely excepted in the clinical community and the scientific community that cardiac MRI is the gold standard for everything that you can almost do or diagnose in a cardiac setting,” Itamar Kandel, HeartVista’s CEO, told MD+DI. “But the problem is that the actual scan itself is very complex; takes a lot of time, and takes a very high level of skill to even perform.”

He added, “You have this situation where the best technology is not approachable to the vast majority of the needs. The problem we came to solve is to bring this technology to the masses -to democratize Cardiac MRI.”

HeartVista’s FDA-cleared Cardiac Package uses AI-assisted software to prescribe the standard cardiac views with just one click, and in as few as 10 seconds, while the patient breathes freely. A unique artifact detection neural network is incorporated in HeartVista’s protocol to identify when the image quality is below the acceptable threshold, prompting the operator to reacquire the questioned images if desired. Inversion time is optimized with further AI assistance prior to the myocardial delayed-enhancement acquisition.

A 4D flow measurement application uses a non-Cartesian, volumetric parallel imaging acquisition to generate high-quality images in a fraction of the time. The Cardiac Package also provides preliminary measures of left ventricular function, including ejection fraction, left ventricular volumes, and mass.

“We don’t just take images that come out of the machines and try to say something clinically interesting about it,” Kandel said. “We actually take control of the magnet itself. Meaning, we control the machine. We manipulate the electromagnetic field. We construct the images and run the pulse sequences.”

Kandel added, “Once we control the machine that’s when we can start automating. This is where the AI and machine learning parts come into play. If you look at the operation of a cardiac scan, it’s required for the technician to do between 100 and 300 different clicks on the interphase. That’s a huge amount of work and you have to be really trained on the physics of the machine and the anatomy of the heart to be able to produce a useable study. We automated all of this work and moved it from up to 300 clicks to a single click of a button.”

The company said it is presenting its new One Click Cardiac Package features at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting in Chicago, on Dec. 4, 2019, at 2 p.m., in the AI Showcase Theater. HeartVista will also be at Booth #11137 for the duration of the conference, from Dec. 1 through Dec. 5.

About the Author(s)

Omar Ford

Omar Ford is MD+DI's Editor-in-Chief. You can reach him at [email protected].

 

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