PET Imaging Application Improves Detection of Advanced Coronary Artery Disease

The first integrated imaging application has been developed for myocardial blood flow measurement.

Siemens Healthcare (Erlangen, Germany) announced the availability of syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow, a new cardiac imaging software application for the Biograph positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET-CT) scanners that may have significant impact on the diagnosis of patients with advanced coronary artery disease (CAD), and specifically, with those patients with multivessel disease, or those who are asymptomatic. This new application was presented, at the American Society for Nuclear Cardiology scientific session in Minneapolis, MN, USA, in October 2009.

According to the "Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics 2009 Update,” published by the American Heart Association (AHA; Dallas, TX), one of every five deaths each year is attributed to CAD, making it the largest killer in the United States. At least 50% of those who die suddenly of CAD had no previous symptoms, and it has been reported that those with documented CAD have five to seven times the risk of having a myocardial infarction or dying than the general population.

Within this large CAD patient population, published clinical literature has estimated that 5-10% of CAD patients have balanced vessel disease, and up to 8% are asymptomatic at-risk patients. It is particularly within this high-risk group that the new imaging application offers additional diagnostic value. syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow is the first and only U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared software from a major vendor to offer a new method for quantitatively evaluating the extent of ischemia via high-performance PET•CT imaging and advanced applications.

"Direct healthcare costs are expected to continue to grow to more than [US]$90 billion for coronary artery disease in the U.S. this year. Early diagnosis and more effective risk evaluation are essential if we are to capitalize on opportunities to improve the quality of care for at-risk patients, and equally important, to manage the overall cost of care,” said Britta Fünfstück, CEO, molecular imaging, Siemens Healthcare. "Technological innovations, such as the ability to quantify blood flow in at-risk patients, continue to reinforce the critical role that molecular imaging can play in the delivery of high-quality, cost-effective healthcare.”

Quantifying the extent of the disease is important in the patient evaluation. In some instances, a traditional myocardial perfusion study may suggest that the perfusion is within normal ranges, but in fact, it may not be. Specific quantification of perfusion levels in each vessel can help improve the identification of multivessel disease and may mitigate the risk for misdiagnoses or underestimated risk factors.

The new syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow application enables the more definitive measurement of myocardial blood flow during PET perfusion studies as compared to regular myocardial perfusion studies. Combined with the three-dimensional (3D) PET performance of the Biograph family of PET•CT scanners, conventional static perfusion and the dynamic perfusion required for myocardial blood flow is now possible with single-injection protocols for virtually all patients with no additional scan time or patient dose

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