Can a faster heart scan find blocked arteries just as well as the standard test?

If you're having chest pain and need a heart scan, you might be in for a long, uncomfortable test. The standard scan for checking blood flow to the heart takes over 40 minutes. But what if a much faster version worked just as well? A new study tested exactly that. They compared a new, accelerated scan that takes about 19 minutes to the standard, longer scan in 150 people with suspected heart artery disease. The key question was whether the faster scan could find significant blockages just as accurately. The results are promising. The accelerated scan was not inferior to the standard one at detecting which specific heart arteries were blocked. It also performed comparably at the patient level, correctly identifying about 89% of cases. Crucially, patients tolerated the faster scan better. The time saving was substantial—about 24 minutes shorter per scan. For someone lying still in a scanner, that's a big difference in comfort. This suggests that for people being evaluated for chest pain, a quicker, more tolerable scan could provide the answers doctors need without sacrificing accuracy.