Dear CT Insider,
Despite the storied success, both clinical and economic, of multidetector-row CT scanning, responsible voices continue to dispute the notion that MDCT is the best choice for imaging the heart. Among them are cardiac imaging experts Dr. John Rumberger and Dr. James Ehrlich, who favor electron beam tomography (EBT) in this issue's Insider Exclusive.
Rumberger, a clinical professor of medicine at Ohio State University in Columbus, and Ehrlich, an adjunct assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, question whether the benefits of widespread heart scanning with 4- and 8-slice MDCT are justified by the risks.
They charge that peer-reviewed clinical validations of EBT calcium scoring are often lifted wholesale to promote a cottage industry of MDCT-equipped screening practices. And they believe that EBT scanners offer far better spatial resolution of the moving heart with significantly less radiation than MDCT.
With more and more detector arrays on the way, MDCT's future is looking bright, the authors acknowledge. But, they say, 64-slice imaging isn't what today's heart scanners are peddling to a screening-happy public. You'll find the rest of the editorial in our Insider Exclusive, offered to our CT Insider subscribers before the rest of our members can access it.
![Images show the pectoralis muscles of a healthy male individual who never smoked (age, 66 years; height, 178 cm; body mass index [BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared], 28.4; number of cigarette pack-years, 0; forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV1], 97.6% predicted; FEV1: forced vital capacity [FVC] ratio, 0.71; pectoralis muscle area [PMA], 59.4 cm2; pectoralis muscle volume [PMV], 764 cm3) and a male individual with a smoking history and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) (age, 66 years; height, 178 cm; BMI, 27.5; number of cigarette pack-years, 43.2, FEV1, 48% predicted; FEV1:FVC, 0.56; PMA, 35 cm2; PMV, 480.8 cm3) from the Canadian Cohort Obstructive Lung Disease (i.e., CanCOLD) study. The CT image is shown in the axial plane. The PMV is automatically extracted using the developed deep learning model and overlayed onto the lungs for visual clarity.](https://img.auntminnie.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/03/genkin.25LqljVF0y.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=focalpoint&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)