Every year hundreds of thousends of people die from sudden cardiac death (SCD), the vast majority because of high frequency arrhythmia. Many of these deaths could be avoided if therapy for example with an implantable defibrillator would be initiated on time. Until now the evaluation of that risk was fairly vague. As an example, only in Germany every year about 80'000 people are not identified to be at risk for SCD and die. On the other hand about 20'000 of the approximate 25'000 people per year that have an ICD implanted do never develop life-threatening arrhythmias that would have to be terminated by the device to save their lives.

This dramatic problem is now being challenged in Hamburg with an Apollo CXS cardiac diagnostic system that is going into clinical routine use on March 1st, 2010 at the Asklepios Hospital St. Georg under supervision of Professor Karl-Heinz Kuck. From now on everybody can have his individual risk for SCD because of ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia evaluated and this way is in case enabled to initiate the right therapy. Dr. Tönnis, head of department for arrhythmia underlines, "Everybody can be at risk for SCD, quite often no early indications are recognisable, therefore a regular preventive test is very important. The MFI test does not have any side-effects and is performed within a few minutes." Statistically in the majority of the cases the result is calming and the next test is advisable after 18 to 24 months.