Date:15/08/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/08/15/stories/2006081503960200.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Hospital does 1,000 one-minute angiograms

Special Correspondent

It conducts `awake cardiac surgery' without anaesthesia

Bangalore: Trinity Hospital and Heart Foundation, Basavanagudi, has carried out over 1,000 CR coronary angiograms since March 2006, when it acquired its 64-slice Brilliance Cardiac CT Scan, one of the few in the region.

The hospital has been recognised as a centre for training in Cardiac CT, also known as "one-minute angiogram".

Chairman and Managing Director B.G. Muralidhara, who is the hospital's chief interventional cardiologist, said: "We were the first to implant bio-degradable and absorbable metallic stents on heart patients. We were one of the few hospitals to perform awake cardiac surgery without anaesthesia and pioneered in Alcohol Embolisation and Tracheal Stenting and other new keyhole procedures and saved many heart patients from having to go through major surgery."

The one-minute angiogram is a procedure where an angiogram of the heart is performed in five seconds.

It is a non-invasive technique with no tubes or catheters put into a patient's body. Conducted as an outpatient procedure, the patient can be out of the hospital with an angiogram report within a few minutes. It is considered painless and risk-free and accurate.

In a few minutes, not only the heart but any part of the body can be imaged and angiogram of the brain, kidney or legs carried out.

This procedure has been carried out on patients as young as nine months and as old as 91.