by Jay Campbell, Chair, SCMR Communications Committee

Greetings from the SCMR Communications Committee! The committee has been busy getting out the message about the great imaging that CMR provides.

Purvi Parwani has developed a Social Media team that has been increasing the social media profile of CMR. Please look for our posts on your favorite platform and help us by responding and retweeting. Thanks to Purvi and her team for all of their great efforts in this regard!

The SCMR Case of the Week (COTW) team led by Sylvia Chen has continued to put out great cases for the SCMR website. They are always looking for new interesting cases so please consider submitting cases. The team is also now taking submissions for CMR cases in COVID-19 to build an educational rapid reference repository. This year, COTW cases will be published together in a once/year publication in JCMR. Thanks to the COTW and JCMR editorial teams for making this possible! Please also look for this great resource of “Why CMR?” discussing the many great uses of CMR.

Stress CMR Perfusion Imaging in the United States (SPINS) Study



The Stress CMR Perfusion Imaging in the United States (SPINS) Study is the first study of the SCMR Registry and has provided important clinical insights of CMR assessing stable chest pain syndromes by publishing several manuscripts in leading cardiovascular journals. Led by Dr. Raymond Kwong (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), SPINS enrolled one of the largest stress CMR cohorts, including 2,349 intermediate-risk patients from 13 participating US sites, spanning 11 states (Kwong et al. JACC 2019). In this study, 1,583 patients (67%) had a normal stress CMR and were observed to experience low annual risk of cardiovascular death or acute MI (<1%/year), low clinical likelihood or need for coronary revascularization, and low associated healthcare cost spending.  In a subsequent just-published study using the SPINS registry, a cost-effectiveness model was created to compare multiple current imaging strategies in the contemporary US setting - stress CMR was favorable when compared to other imaging modalities (including SPECT and CCTA) and coronary angiography (Ge et al. JACC Imaging. 2020). Building upon this momentum, a third study focusing on the clinical impact of stress CMR in patients without known CAD, has demonstrated that CMR can successfully reclassify patients across ACC/AHA guideline-based risk categories, beyond clinical risk factors (Antiochos et al. JAMA Card. In press). Finally, a fourth study focusing on a high-risk subset of the SPINS cohort, those with reduced LVEF (<50%), again demonstrated the incremental predictive value of stress CMR over traditional clinical risk models (Ge et al. JACC Imaging. In press). Many other analyses from this comprehensive dataset are ongoing to answer additional key clinical questions.

SCMR is proud to announce its collaboration with CAPACITY ( C ardiac complic A tions in P atients With S A RS C orona v I rus 2 regis T r Y ), an international global registry led by Professor Folkert Asselbergs .

CAPACITY-COVID offers a comprehensive data collection tool that facilitates uniform data collection of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. The registry builds upon the Case Report Form (CRF) released by the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) and World Health Organisation (WHO) in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Within CAPACITY-COVID, the ISARIC-WHO CRF has been extended with multiple additional data collection instruments on cardiovascular risk factors, the use of cardiovascular medication and NSAIDs, cardiac biomarkers, ECG, echocardiography, cardiac MRI, chest CT, invasive cardiac procedures and cardiac complications.

SCMR is endorsing CAPACITY-COVID as the largest international cardiovascular registry which includes cardiac MRI data collection, among many other parameters. The aim of this collaboration is to work closely in aligning the CAPACITY CRF for cardiac MRI data to our SCMR COVID-19 Registry to collect the largest database of cardiac MRI in the COVID infection worldwide.

In addition to joining our SCMR COVID-19 Registry , SCMR members are invited to consider joining CAPACITY to contribute to a larger cardiovascular data collection effort and advance the field for our patients.

The current annual output of 600 scans falls short for our population of 490,000. We have three upcoming CMR specialists, and trainees are provided with a complete multimodality repertoire of cardiac imaging. A new scanner, equipped with accelerated image acquisition and tissue mapping, is due to be installed. As the service matures, we aspire to recruit fellows from neighbouring Mediterranean countries.

Submission Deadline is September 22, 2020