Heart of the hospital

John Frame looked into Dale Dean's heart - literally.

There it was on the screen.

Dean's heart.

Sliced. Charted. Pumping and thumping. Muscled chambers expanding and contracting. Valves opening and closing.

Living and moving in real time.

This was a series of sonograms of the retired teacher and guidance counselor's 73-year-old heart - wracked by decades of smoking that ended less than five years ago.

"See anything like I had a heart attack in there?" Dean asked.

"No," replied Frame, a cardio-sonographer at Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

"According to Dr. [David] Roth, this is the future for me," Dean said.

Roth would soon study the sonograms - still photos and computer-screen videos - to figure out if a shunt needs to be put in the Bigfork man's heart.

Colors erupted to ebb and flow on screen of the ultrasound imaging system - modified with software and probes to chart hearts.

Orangish-yellow flashes showed blood whooshing toward the probe that Frame's hand held on the skin over Dean's heart. Bluish flashes showed blood flowing away from the probe.

Other colors - blues, greens and reds - showed up as Frame measured the chambers of Dean's heart as well as how fast the blood pumped through the valves and chambers.

Whatever the results are from Dean's cardio-sonograms, they will likely be extremely accurate.

That's because the Intersocietal Commission for the Accreditation of Echocardiology Laboratories has recently given national accreditation to Kalispell Regional's cardio-sonography section in adult transthoracic exams, adult stress exams, and adult transesophageal exams.

Kalispell Regional is the only hospital in Montana to be accredited in all three disciplines.

So Kalispell Regional is nationally accredited for ultrasound exams of the heart through the chest, exams with the probe inserted through the throat to go behind the heart, and to conduct tests looking at a patient using a treadmill and then lying down.

The national accreditation is not "pass-fail" type of exam - meaning that no accreditation does not translate to being substandard, the commission's Web site states.

Instead, it is a quality assurance program of inspections and peer reviews that confirm that a lab has an extremely high rate of accuracy.

A hospital must conduct at least 600 cardio-sonograms exams a years to be eligible for accreditation. Kalispell Regional does roughly 3,000 annually.

Kalispell Regional's cardio-sonographers are Frame, Heather Curtiss, Philip Burton and Darla Iverson. Renae Solum is the hospital's director of cardiovascular services.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, Dean sat up during his exam and asked: "Am I gonna live?"

Frame replied: "I think so."

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com