Microbubbles

Cesar Castilla likes to relax with his family. You'd never know it now, but he was anything but relaxed a few weeks prior when he thought he was having a heart attack:

I have the concern because my family history and because of my age etcetera…

The sharp pain searing his left arm and shoulder led him to the emergency room of the Chest Pain Center at Oregon Health and Science University.

: Put you left arm up behind your head

By using a technology he helped to develop, Cardiologist Kevin Wei was able to rule out what Castilla feared most:

And we found that, in fact, his heart muscle function and the blood supply to all areas of the heart muscle were normal and so this allowed us to exclude a heart attack as a cause of his symptoms.

Myocardial Contrast Echocardiography, or M-C-E for short, is a cutting edge treatment that allows cardiologists to visualize decreased blood flow to heart more accurately. Tiny bubbles roughly the size of red blood cells are injected into the veins and travel to the heart muscle. These microbubbles have acoustic properties which make it easier to get an ultrasound image of the heart.

Which is the most complex organ in terms of imaging because the heart moves and shakes and contracts and moves with respiration so it's hard to follow.

: All this bright signal with in the cavity are the bubbles

Following the movement of the heart in real time is a significant advance over traditional imaging techniques...

Even the tests that we use such as the electric cardiogram may not read abnormal in up to thirty percent of patients who are actually presenting with an on going heart attack.

Leading researchers in the field are hopeful microbubble technology may soon be used for targeted drug delivery:

So for example the cancer is growing and it is because of all these blood vessels. So if we choke off these blood vessels the cancer can't grow. So in the bubbles we put a drug and when the bubbles get to this abnormal area of flow we zap it with ultrasound so then the bubble bursts.

In the meantime, patients like Cesar Castilla are happy to get back a clean bill of health—without a lengthy hospital stay. For WebMD, I'm Damon Meharg.