Every year in the U.S., 5.1 million people suffer from heart failure. The costs for those patients come in around $32 billion annually, according to the CDC.

An innovative new 4-D ultrasound software from GE Healthcare called cSound is poised to help bring those numbers down. The software, which is compliant with GE's Vivid S70, Vivid E90 and Vivid E95 advanced cardiovascular ultrasound systems, produces highly detailed moving images based on data generated and processed in real time.

"Seeing the heart in 4-D means we are seeing all 3-dimensions of the heart in space, plus the heart moving in real time," Al Lojewski, general manager of cardiovascular ultrasound at GE, told HCB News. Unlike other heart imaging procedures that may produce unclear images, cSound lets clinicians "see the human heart's chambers, valves, vessels, and other intricate structures with amazing clarity."
Because the system depends on algorithms to interpret images, it has greater versatility than traditional hardware-based beamforming machines, which process each piece of data separately. The cSound software was inspired by supercomputers, and can collect a potentially infinite amount of pixel-by-pixel information from the patient.

According to Lojewski, the most important thing about the capabilities of cSound is that it is poised to reduce the number of inconclusive exams and improve cardiovascular diagnoses.

Today, the most widely ordered cardiovascular test, transthoracic echocardiograms (TTE), are inconclusive 10 to 15 percent of the time, which can result in costly and invasive follow-up testing. Those follow-ups can cost up to 2.7 times as much as the initial ultrasound and are most frequently needed for patients in critical condition, suffering from lung disease, or obesity.

"We strongly believe in the power of ultrasound, as a portable, relatively low-cost imaging modality with no ionizing radiation, to rapidly transform how patients are cared for, and cSound is an example of that," said Lojewski.

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