As surgical pulmonary endarterectomy significantly improves survival in patients with chronic thrombo-embolic pulmonary hypertension it is important to correctly identify patients. Using cardiopulmonary MRI it is possible to screen for the presence of chronic thombo-emboli in all cases who can tolerate MRI, reducing the requirement for SPECT (and therefore patient radiation exposure). The same scan can also predict the presence of pulmonary hypertension, and due to a high specificity we can reduce the reliance upon an invasive test (right heart catheterisation) by around 50%.
This abstract and the presentation materials are available to members only; a login is required.