Panasonic's CardioHealth Station Improves Patient Outcomes Through Early Diagnosis in Primary Care

Panasonic announced today the European availability of its innovative ultrasound tool for personalized preventive medicine, the CardioHealth Station, at renowned medical trade fair MEDICA in Dusseldorf, Germany (booth 9E47). The device, which is FDA cleared and recently secured its CE registration mark, is designed to assist medical professionals in making a quick and valuable assessment of cardiovascular health. The test takes less than five minutes from the time the scan starts to the delivery of a report. The CardioHealth Station is now available in Europe having obtained all necessary regulatory approvals.
Dr. Davide Vanoli, Umeå Heart Centre, University of Northern Sweden, welcomes the availability of the CardioHealth station in primary care: "This device enables healthcare professionals to assess cardiovascular risk in a primary care setting, taking it out of the hospital. Patients can be assessed earlier in the treatment pathway, which leads to enhanced patient outcomes, and a more accurate assessment of patient risk than looking at risk factors alone."
Recently published studies (ARIC & MESA) have shown that vascular health assessment can reveal the risks of a likely cardiovascular event. The ARIC study, a recent multi-institution study, indicates that certain patients can be reclassified in terms of the level of risk of a cardiovascular event by looking at the carotid artery thickness and the presence of plaque in that patient. As a result, Panasonic developed the innovative CardioHealth Station, a much needed device that will help the medical practitioner, quickly detect thickened carotid arteries or plaques. This process can now be taken out of the hospital setting and easily done in primary care. What once used to be difficult and impractical to do on a mass basis is now made possible by the innovative automation technology loaded as standard in the CardioHealth Station.
Chairman and CEO of Panasonic Europe Ltd. Laurent Abadie, stated, "We know that the cardiovascular health bill in Europe is over EUR190 billion a year. The CardioHealth station is an example of our commitment to ease the physical, physiological and financial burden of healthcare. Early diagnosis and treatment is one of three trends shaping our global healthcare strategy, which we aim to realise by supplying technologies that diagnose the health condition quicker and build the foundation for affordable and manageable prevention solutions."
The CardioHealth Station has a built-in portable ultrasound system optimized to perform a non-invasive examination of the peripheral arteries. It provides an automated measurement of the intima-media thickness (IMT) of arteries such as the common carotid and allows the user to search for arterial plaques using real-time B-mode imaging. The touchscreen keyboard allows the user to input various parameters relating to traditional cardiovascular risk factors. A built in calculator provides risk scores commonly used in a variety of geographical locations (Framingham Risk Score, PROCAM Health Check Score and Risk score based on the SCORE Project). This information is supplemented with an IMT measurement of the carotid artery to generate a comprehensive report to aid the physician in assessing cardiovascular risk.