Government Medical College, Thiruvananthapuram, has acquired a modern Point of Care (POC) system, which helps in the early identification of suspected acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) through blood tests.
The new POC device — cobas h 232 — which has been made available to the HDS lab at MCH, can detect or diagnose heart attack in a patient through the rapid determination of cardiac biomarkers such as Troponin T, NT-proBNP, D-dimer, CK-MB, Myoglobin in blood, through a blood test within 14 minutes.
Normally, blood tests for determining cardiac markers would take nearly four hours for confirmation, an official release said.
At MCH, where hundreds of patients crowd the Emergency wing, provision of a POC system could be a boon, as suspected heart attack cases can be shifted to high care unit in Cardiology wing as soon as the blood tests confirm the event.
