Birmingham Heart Clinic, P.C.

Even the loyal viewers of The Oprah Show have never seen Oprah quite like this! It's her heart as seen in the new 64-slice CT scanner.

Though CT scanners have been around for years, the new 64-slice CT scanner's technology actually allows doctors and patients to watch a heart beating. "If you think about it, the CAT scan takes a picture. If it's your gallbladder, it just sits there and waits for the photo shoot," Dr. Oz says. But to really capture what is happening with a heart, "You need a scanner that can take pictures so fast it can catch the heart in a beat. These new scanners can take almost 200 pictures a second so they can get your heart at so many different angles that you capture it."

Before the invention of this new CT scanner, Dr. Oz says, doctors relied on calcium scores to determine hardening of the arteries. However, this was a highly inexact science. "What makes this technology so cool," Dr. Oz says, "is you can actually go beyond calcium which is just a symptom."

Information taken from Oprah.com
http://www.oprah.com/health/yourbody/

Birmingham Heart Clinic, P.C., 100 Pilot Medical Drive, Suite 300, Birmingham, Alabama 35235 - Phone: (205) 856-2284 - Fax: (205) 815-4777

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