BACKGROUND Report cards of risk-adjusted mortality rates of individual cardiac surgeons have been publicly available in New York State since 1991. A survey of New York cardiologists in 1996 found that these report cards had little effect on their referral recommendations to cardiac surgeons. It is unknown whether the influence of report cards on referral behavior has changed over time. METHOD...

BACKGROUND The recent American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association exercise testing guidelines provided equations to calculate treadmill scores and recommended their use to improve the predictive accuracy of the standard exercise test. However, if physicians can estimate the probability of coronary artery disease as well as the scores can, there would be no reason to add this compl...

BACKGROUND The eye is well known to be sensitive to clearly high doses (>2 Gy) of ionizing radiation. In recent years, however, cataracts have been observed in populations exposed to lower doses. Interventional cardiologists are repeatedly and acutely exposed to scattered ionizing radiation (X-rays) during the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures they perform. These "low" exposures may cause d...

In the past, female physicians, especially cardiologists, were a rarity. The first physicians were officially trained only at the end of the 19th century. In the last decades of the 20th century, the number of women in medicine increased tremendously; however, the number of female cardiologists has remained low, especially in invasive cardiology. The reasons include the invasive character of th...

background: despite the positive impact of cardiac rehabilitation (cr) on quality of life and mortality, the majority of people who could benefit from this program fail to participate in it. the lack of referral from the physician is a common reason that patients give for not seeking cr. the objective of this study was to compare factors affecting cr referral by cardiologists. methods: a cross-...

We develop an algorithm which exceeds the performance of board certified cardiologists in detecting a wide range of heart arrhythmias from electrocardiograms recorded with a single-lead wearable monitor. We build a dataset with more than 500 times the number of unique patients than previously studied corpora. On this dataset, we train a 34-layer convolutional neural network which maps a sequenc...