MANILA, Philippines - A noted US cardiologist recently presented the latest cardiac diagnostic technology before the medical and scientific community at the Makati Medical Center.
Dr. John Strobeck, director of the heart failure program of the Valley Hospital, Ridgewood, NJ and founder of the Heart-Lung Center in Hawthorne, NJ, an outpatient, comprehensive multi-specialty care center specializing in cardio-pulmonary disease management and prevention, specified the use of the new machine called Multifunction Cardiography (MCG) and compared it to the traditional ECG.
MCG adopts a mathematical model or computational biology approach in clinical medicine and begins a new era for more accurate and earlier detection of coronary disease non-invasively, without the risk of test-related consequences, such as radiation, or contrast-induced reactions.
One of the features of MCG is its analysis which expands the analog ECG signal sign into a series of mathematical functions, more closely representing the complexity of a living heart. The MCG technology has been validated through numerous peer-reviewed studies, demonstrating its accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity to be equal to or better than experienced clinical judgement.
The introduction of MCG to the Philippine market started when Shinichi Takahashi of Premier Heart Japan requested Evelyn Singson, former president of the Management Association of the Philippines, for advice on how the MCG can best come into the market. They agreed to have the
machine undergo clinical trials on Filipino patients in a research-oriented hospital and brought him to the Makati Medical Center to meet the fellows of the Cardiology Department and Dr. Roberto Anastacio.
Soon after, one of the two principal proponents of the MCG Dr. John Strobeck agreed to come to Manila to make a presentation of their research findings to heart specialists and to discuss the extensive work they have done to get this technology tested, analyzed and finally approved for the general use by the US medical community and the US Medicare System.
Testing followed at the Makati Medical Center and Makati Med medical director Dr. Benjamin Alimurung and head of the Cardiology Department Dr. Adoracion Nambayan Abad decided to make the tests and clinical trials an official research project of the Department of Medicine. This impressed Dr. Strobeck who immediately decided to expand the testing outside the US and proposed that Makati Medical Center be the first foreign-based hospital to participate in its expansion into the international arena.