State of the Art in Cardiac Hybrid Technology: PET/MR

Simultaneous PET/MRI is an emerging technique combining two powerful imaging modalities in a single device. The wide variety of available tracers for perfusion and metabolic studies and the high sensitivity of positron emission tomography (PET) combined with the high spatial resolution and soft tissue contrast of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in depicting cardiac morphology and function as well as MRI’s absence of ionizing radiation makes PET/MRI very attractive to radiologists and clinicians. Nevertheless, PET/MR scientific and clinical promise is to be considered in the context of numerous technical challenges that hinder its use in the clinical setting. For example, in order for a PET system to work correctly within an MR field, major changes are required to the photon detection chain such as the elimination of photomultiplier tubes, etc. Another significant limitation of PET/MRI is the lack of an electron density map (as is the case with PET-CT) that can be readily obtained from MRI (the latter measures proton not electron density) and used to correct PET data for attenuation. Moreover, as with PET-CT, cardiac and respiratory motions cause image degradations that affect image quality and accuracy both in static and dynamic PET imaging. As a result, overcoming these (and other) technical limitations is a very active area of research both in academic institutions as well as industry. In this paper, we review recent literature on cardiac PET/MRI, present the state-of-the-art of this technology, and explore promising preclinical and clinical cardiac applications where PET/MRI could play a substantial role.