Steve Brunst, CEO of InnerVision, a San Diego company that specializes in CT or “life” scan technology, is the first to admit that gay men tend to look like “Greek gods” – “I wish everybody looked that healthy,” he jokes. But, Brunst adds, his company is offering a health tool that he feels is possibly as crucial as diet and exercise: detection.

InnerVision is a family-run company based in Carlsbad, delivering wellness imaging through EBT (Electron Beam Tomography) scans that quickly deliver medical information and pinpoint possible health problems – primarily, coronary disease.

“Empower yourself – know more,” says Brunst, explaining that there are likely millions of people (60 million, he believes) living with intermediate coronary disease who don’t know it. “This is not a time to allow disease to get the best of us. This whole head-in-the-sand concept of denial, it doesn’t need to go on that way. … For $500, you can find out whether you have coronary disease – I don’t know what you can buy for $500 these days that’s medical that can address the number-one killer in this country, coronary disease.”

Brunst, a former marketing executive, and his father, Dr. Robert Brunst, a general practitioner with 25 years in the medical community, began InnerVision in November 2002. The father-son team saw an opportunity, and a need, to reinvigorate CT scan technology, which, due to poor management from previous providers of the scan technology, was being underused. Currently, the InnerVision team is reintroducing the scan technology to individuals interested in getting complementary health information, and to the medical community.

CT scanning technology has been in clinical use for some 25 years now. More commonly associated with strip malls than medical offices, for many years EBT, better known as Ultrafast CT Scan, has been looked at as a sort of fringe medical procedure. This could be due to the fact that it is commonly advertised on radio drive time shows in melodramatic commercials featuring heart-rending vignettes or that most insurance companies still do not cover the procedure. Many cardiologists swear by them while others consider them a waste of time and money, claiming that the scans generate a number of false positives and erode the credibility of the profession.

The scans basically involve a series computer processed X-ray images, but up until recently they were never useful for imaging the heart. This is because traditional CT scans took several minutes to acquire an image, and a scan of a beating heart created nothing more than a blurred image. However, the EBT scan uses a technique called “gating”, that allows it to make images of the heart. Because of this, the Ultrafast CT scan does show, with a high degree of accuracy, whether the coronary arteries contain deposits of calcium, which can be a sign of early cardiac disease.

At a cost of $2 million, the machines that perform the Ultrafast CT Scan are a major investment for any hospital or medical facility. Many hospitals and medical facilities have opted not to shell out the $2 million.

On the flip side, hospitals and medical facilities who were early adopters of the Ultrafast CT Scan capitalized on the procedure despite the lack of an insurance endorsement because they were no longer bogged down in the traditional healthcare system waiting for paperwork to be done or for pre-certification from insurance companies.

A new study may help put some added credibility behind the non-invasive procedure. New research suggests that Ultrafast CT scanning or calcium scoring to detect calcium in coronary arteries can help predict coronary heart disease, particularly in patients of moderate risk who lack symptoms. These patients are often difficult to treat because they fall into the “intermediate-risk” category based on factors such as age, sex, smoking history, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood glucose levels.

The study, conducted at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, the University of Southern California, and UCLA, indicates that a high coronary artery calcium score (CACS), as determined through CT scanning, can add to the predictive value of the standard risk factors. Study findings were published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association and reported in a Wall Street Journal article.

As a result, physicians might move moderate-risk patients — those with a 10-19 percent chance of suffering a heart attack in 10 years based on standard factors — into more aggressive treatment involving cholesterol-lowering statin drugs as well as diet, exercise, and stress-reduction approaches.

According to the researchers involved in the study, the findings apply to those age 45 or older who fit certain parameters — for example, high LDL cholesterol with little protection from high HDL (the “good” cholesterol) and no other risk factors. Conclusions don’t apply to diabetics who are already at significantly higher risk for heart disease. Study authors recommend CT scanning for patients who have been evaluated by a physician who has measured their cholesterol.

“It’s never too late to get into shape and that’s a powerful thing,” says InnerVision’s Brunst, who feels that having the EBT imaging can motivate an individual to get healthier. “Don’t think that because you’re 40 or 50 or you’re in a wheelchair or you’ve lost someone you love, it’s ever never too late to take charge of your health. But getting a road map is very important.”