INCIC featured in the SCMR Newsletter: “CMR in Chile, Spinning Fast”

Chilean cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) made the front page of its leading international society. In its April 2021 issue, the newsletter of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR) featured the Chilean Institute of Cardiac Imaging (INCIC) in its “Member Success Stories” section, in a story titled “CMR in Chile, Spinning Fast”.

The article described a demanding starting point. Although CMR had been available in Chile for nearly a decade, it was rarely performed for a variety of reasons, and the development of high-quality clinical programs was at a very early stage. Research, by contrast, was far more developed thanks to institutions such as the Millennium Nucleus in Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, a government-funded program.

According to the story, the picture changed through the collaborative work of a group of young cardiologists formally trained in CMR abroad. After initially working at different sites, their shared vision and methods brought them together under the newly created INCIC, whose goal is to develop high-quality, patient-centred cardiac imaging programs at hospitals across Chile, using state-of-the-art scanners and sequences such as strain, 4D flow and mapping. In the same vein, the article highlighted that a public hospital in Santiago, Sótero del Río, had created the country’s first integrated CARD-RADS CMR program.

The newsletter introduced the team at the time: Javier López-Opitz as executive director, Hugo Martínez as administrative director and Julián Vega-Adauy as academic director, together with scientific advisors Daniel Lorenzatti, Javier Urmeneta and Diego Lowenstein.

Looking ahead, the story reported that INCIC was expanding the most ambitious high-quality CMR program in Chile, performing around one hundred scans a month. Challenging cases were discussed with an international scientific advisory board, and this collaborative approach pooled the experience of its specialists: together, more than 8,000 CMR studies accumulated during their training in Chile and abroad, making INCIC by far the most experienced CMR group in the country. The next step would be to extend the work to teaching and research by launching Chile’s first CMR fellowship.