It is an odd thing to hear from a man who reads scans for a living: most people do not need one. Prof. Rodrigo Salgado, a radiologist in Antwerp, Belgium, and president of the European Society of Cardiovascular Radiology, spends his days looking inside arteries for the disease that kills more Europeans than anything else. His argument is not for more imaging. It is for the right imaging, in the right patient, and for a health checkup that can look further than it does now.
We have different numbers that medicine trusts. Blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, the familiar risk factors that sort a population into low, medium and high risk, are, however, in his words, only “proxies of what’s actually going on inside the body.” They describe a crowd. They say little about the person in the chair.
Which sets up the question his whole case turns on. Does Europe need new machines and new budgets to cut its biggest killer, or the will to use the ones it already owns? His answer is unambiguous, and it is the harder of the two.