Weighing the Costs of a CT Scan’s Look Inside the Heart

- And they expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.
- Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart?
- “If you have ownership of the machine,” he later recalled, “you’re going to want to utilize the machine.” He said no to the offer.

it cost $1 million , they need to make 4000 scans to make that money .
- Useful for emergency heart attack patient, but not required for majority of them

For too many people, the scans are simply inappropriate, said Dr. Howard C. Herrmann, director of interventional cardiology at the University of Pennsylvania. “I find many patients have CT angiograms who shouldn’t be getting CT angiograms.”