Abstract
Magnetocardiography (MCG), which is nowadays 60 years old, has not yet been
fully accepted as a clinical tool. Nevertheless, a large body of research and
several clinical trials have demonstrated its reliability in providing additional
diagnostic electrophysiological information if compared with conventional noninvasive
electrocardiographic methods. Since the beginning, one major objective
difficulty has been the need to clean the weak cardiac magnetic signals from
the much higher environmental noise, especially that of urban and hospital
environments. The obvious solution to record the magnetocardiogram in highly
performant magnetically shielded rooms has provided the ideal setup for
decades of research demonstrating the diagnostic potential of this technology.
However, only a few clinical institutions have had the resources to install and
run routinely such highly expensive and technically demanding systems.
Therefore, increasing attempts have been made to develop cheaper alternatives
to improve the magnetic signal-to-noise ratio allowing MCG in unshielded
hospital environments. In this article, the most relevant milestones in the MCG’s
journey are reviewed, addressing the possible reasons beyond the currently
long-lasting difficulty to reach a clinical breakthrough and leveraging the
authors’ personal experience since the early 1980s attempting to finally bring
MCG to the patient’s bedside for many years thus far. Their nearly four decades
of foundational experimental and clinical research between shielded and
unshielded solutions are summarized and referenced, following the original
vision that MCG had to be intended as an unrivaled method for contactless
assessment of the cardiac electrophysiology and as an advanced method for
non-invasive electroanatomical imaging, through multimodal integration with
other non-fluoroscopic imaging techniques. Whereas all the above accounts for
the past, with the available innovative sensors and more affordable active
shielding technologies, the present demonstrates that several novel systems
have been developed and tested in multicenter clinical trials adopting both
shielded and unshielded MCG built-in hospital environments. The future of
MCG will mostly be dependent on the results from the ongoing progress in
novel sensor technology, which is relatively soon foreseen to provide multiple
alternatives for the construction of more compact, affordable, portable, and
even wearable devices for unshielded MCG inside hospital environments and
perhaps also for ambulatory patients.
Lingua originale | English |
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pagine (da-a) | N/A-N/A |
Numero di pagine | 24 |
Rivista | Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine |
Volume | 2023 |
DOI | |
Stato di pubblicazione | Pubblicato - 2023 |
Pubblicato esternamente | Sì |
Keywords
- Magnetocardiography (MCG)
- electrophysiology arrhythmias mapping