A quantitative cardiac angiography system for use in a clinical trial

The Bypass Angioplasty Revascularization Investigation (BARI) is a multicenter randomized trial being sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to determine the relative efficacy of coronary-artery bypass graft surgery versus percutaneous coronary transluminal angioplasty in patients with multivessel coronary artery disease. BARI requires objective analysis of both coronary and left-ventricular angiography from several thousand patients at fourteen geographically dispersed medical centers. In order to collect and analyze these data, the authors developed a personal-computer-based distributed data collection system that is installed at Stanford and at each of the clinical sites. The system has been in operation for six weeks and has proved to be highly successful. The system hardware and software components are listed, and the operation and user interface are described and illustrated with sample dialog screens and graphics