Dedicated cardiac CZT SPECT is steadily moving to achieve its destiny

Excerpt

Conventional SPECT based on Anger gamma camera has been the cornerstone for the evaluation of myocardial perfusion imaging in nuclear cardiology.1 Over the last 30 years, successive important progresses in hardware, software, stress agents, and radiotracers built its clinical success. Without being exhaustive let us enumerate some of these important achievements: (1) the widespread availability of ^99mTc-based myocardial perfusion imaging radiotracers in the early 1990s, (2) the commercialization of multi-head gamma cameras, (3) The widespread use of one-injection one-acquisition coupling of perfusion and function in the mid 1990s and (4) the availability of iterative reconstruction with resolution recovery and noise regularization in the mid 2000s. Noteworthy, the clinical value of SPECT/CT hybrid systems available since the early 2000s with its attenuation correction option is still debated but is slowly and steadily making its way to more widespread clinical use. Meanwhile, most centers are using the prone versus supine imaging as an alternative to attenuation correction, increasing unbearably the time of acquisition with conventional SPECT. …