HeartVista, a pioneer in AI-powered MRI solutions, announced that it has been selected by Stanford Health Care to deliver its One Click MRI™ acquisition software on the hospital’s existing Siemens Healthineers and GE Healthcare scanners. The initial three-year agreement will enable Stanford Health Care to grow their cardiac MRI practice with on-site customer support and training provided by HeartVista. The AI-enabled MRI technology will be used by the health system’s radiology and cardiology departments.
The use of cardiac MRI, also known as cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), has been underutilized in clinical practice, despite its ability to more accurately diagnose and aid in the management of cardiovascular disease. This is often due to a number of factors, including lack of trained technologists, high cost to the healthcare system, long scan time and complexity of use. By increasing the throughput of existing MRI machines, and simplifying the operation down to a just few clicks by the technologist, HeartVista’s solution will allow clinicians to produce diagnostic-level images in a fraction of the time and perform more CMRs, without the need for new machines or personnel.
“The demand for CMR has skyrocketed as of late, but with no practical way of meeting the needs of clinicians without significant investment from healthcare systems in capital expenditure and new personnel,” said Itamar Kandel, chief executive officer of HeartVista. “We believe that by providing cardiovascular centers of excellence like Stanford Health Care with our One-Click cardiac package, we can provide physicians with improved cardiac MRI studies, while also reducing the burden to the system and technologists.”
“The validation for CMR as a first-line diagnostic tool continues to gain momentum,” said Dr. Bob Hu, chief medical officer of HeartVista. “With new clinical guidelines designating CMR as a Class I Recommendation for chest pain, the emerging trend of post-COVID myocarditis, and a groundbreaking study in the New England Journal of Medicine1 demonstrating that CMR is the first non-invasive test that is non-inferior to the invasive Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR), we believe adoption for our technology is the only viable way hospitals would be able to handle the increase in CMR demand.”
The agreement between Stanford Health Care and HeartVista went into effect on January 1, 2022, and following staff training and scheduling, patient scans are to commence later this month.