St. Jude Medical announced during ACC.10 a new marketing agreement with Siemens Healthcare that will allow integrated wireless fractional flow reserve (FFR) measurement with PressureWire Aeris as an upgrade to hospitals using the Siemens Axiom Sensis XP hemodynamic recording system.

GE Healthcare introduced the Mars Virtual Sleep Lab, a device that provides a quantitative sleep apnea analysis from any GE-monitored inpatient bed, at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference in Atlanta.

Boston Scientific announced the completion of patient enrollment in the small vessel and long lesion trials of its PLATINUM clinical program during the American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference in Atlanta this week. The trials are designed to compare the platinum chromium Promus Element everolimus-eluting stent to matched historical control groups of patients treated with the Taxus Express paclitaxel-eluting stent.

Spacelabs Healthcare featured the Sentinel, a cardiology information management system, designed to provide hospitals with a paperless workflow, at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting.

ATLANTA -- Rob Beanlands, MD, director of the National Cardiac PET Centre and the Molecular Function and Imaging Program at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, sought to convince physicians that FDG PET is among the best choices in imagining modalities for the assessment of myocardial viability, during an imaging symposium at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference on March 15.

ATLANTA – While quality improvement measures in the inpatient setting may have been described and collected at healthcare practices for years, performance measures in the outpatient setting have not been systematically collected and the current performance in the outpatient setting is unknown, according to a presentation at the “Comparative Effectiveness and Outcomes” session at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference on March 16.

ATLANTA—A novel cardiac PET tracer that images the sympathetic nervous system for heart failure prognosis has been shown in preclinical studies to provide improved image quality compared with a SPECT heart failure tracer, according to a poster presentation on display Monday at the American College of Cardiology conference.

ATLANTA—At one-year in the SPIRIT IV trial, the use of Abbott’s Xience V stent was an “economically dominant strategy” compared with Boston Scientific’s Taxus stent with improved clinical outcomes and lower overall medical costs, according to the interim results of an analysis presented Saturday during CRF's Optimizing PCI Outcomes Symposium, which ran concurrent to the American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference. Slides»

ATLANTA--Currently, cardiovascular imaging accounts for 30 percent of all the medical radiation that people receive in the U.S., noted Andrew Einstein, MD, cardiologist and assistant professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, during a symposium at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual conference on Monday. Einstein also spoke to whether the current levels of radiation are appropriate, as well as strategies for reducing radiation exposure.

ATLANTA--Improvements in quality of care measurements do not decrease 30-day mortality rates, said Jersey Chen, MD, of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) scientific sessions Monday.