Taking a closer look

Deirdre Newman

After having four angioplasties on his heart, 69-year-old Olin

Hackney was concerned about plaque building up on his coronary

arteries. He has also had problems with kidney stones and a spot on

his lung.

So he was looking for a way to check up on his health without a

lot of the poking and prodding that accompanies typical procedures.

Hackney turned to Health Perfect Imaging in Costa Mesa, a new

center that uses high-tech scanning on areas of the body such as the

heart and lungs. The avant-garde procedure is non-invasive and uses

lower doses of radiation than traditional techniques. It also has the

advantage of detecting small tumors that might not turn up through

other methods, co-founder Eric Beltran said.

“Not knowing is scary, and I think that I’d rather find out I had

cancer the size of a pinhead than a golf ball, find out my arteries

are 10% blocked than 90%,” Beltran said.

Beltran was inspired to start the company after hearing of General

Electric’s Imatron C-300 machine from a doctor in Los Angeles. The

doctor told Beltran’s father that the machine was so sensitive that

it might have been able to detect his lymphoma while other

specialists were struggling with traditional techniques.

A few months later, Beltran heard a report on CNN that director

Steven Spielberg had a close encounter of the three-dimensional kind

with the Imatron C-300. Spielberg was scanned for potential heart

problems, but the scan turned up a small benign tumor on his kidney.

Beltran touts the machine as the perfect fit for an area where

people take their health seriously.

“Our community is quite health conscious, and if you can give them

instant gratification that is not only FDA approved, but patented and

98.4% accurate, it’s a perfect marriage,” Beltran said.

The chamber of the machine is similar to an MRI, but is open in

the back to reduce the feeling of claustrophobia. It gives out five

to seven times less radiation than with a typical CT scan, said Steve

Knox, chief technician.

The machine employs electron beam tomography, enabling an electron

beam to produce X-ray images at lightening-quick speed between

heartbeats, creating “stop-action” images free from the blur of

motion.

The heart scan can diagnose heart disease by showing the amount of

calcified plaque on the arteries. Based on those deposits, a

patient’s age and gender, the resulting report will show what

conditions the patient is at risk for. Since the first sign of heart

disease could be a fatal heart attack, the heart scan can be a

lifesaver by detecting heart disease early, even before a standard

exercise stress test, Knox said.

The lung scan checks for tumors, masses, nodules and emphysema,

which looks like a black spot on the lung. The alternative is a chest

X-ray, which will not pick up small abnormalities, Knox said.

It can also detect other problems afflicting the lungs, as

evidenced by a diagnosis when one of the investors of the company

came to visit the office and was coughing so hard that Knox suggested

a lung scan. It turned out that she had pneumonia, Knox said.

In addition to offering heart, lung and full-body scans, Health

Perfect Imaging provides virtual colonoscopy. The pictures generated

of the colon resemble a series of tunnels in the Sahara Desert. The

Imatron can capture images down the folds of the intestine, which

traditional invasive colonoscopy can’t, Beltran said. The company

also provides a bone density scan to detect osteoporosis.

Even when something is detected using three-dimensional pictures,

the technicians still cross-reference it with two-dimensional images

to confirm, Knox said. After taking the images, one report is sent to

the patient and one is sent to his or her doctor.

While many of the scans are recommended for those who are 40 or

older, Beltran said he anticipates a time when scans are recommended

for patients in their teens. This might have helped Darryl Kile, the

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher who died of heart complications last year

at the age of 33, even though he was apparently healthy, Beltran

said.

“An article said the only thing that would have detected his

blocked arteries was the EBT heart scan. That’s this machine,”

Beltran said. “I think in the next couple of years, we’ll see the

standards dropped, and even teenagers will be recommended a scan.

Think of all the French fries they eat at McDonald’s.”