Newswise — Cardiovascular imaging accounts for 30 percent of all the radiation patients receive in the U.S. and today, at the Society for Nuclear Medicine annual meeting, Spectrum Dynamics announced it has begun clinical studies to show that its D-SPECT™ technology can accommodate significantly lower doses of radiopharmaceutical agents so the total radiation exposure to patients and staff is much lower compared to conventional cardiac imaging.
Spectrum Dynamics is conducting two different ultra low dose trials with Columbia University in New York and Cardiovascular Imaging Technologies (CVIT) in Kansas City. They are expected to be published later this year or early in 2011.
Leader of the Columbia study is Andrew Einstein, MD, cardiologist and assistant professor of clinical medicine at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Speaking at a symposium at the American College of Cardiology annual conference in March, Dr. Einstein said current radiation doses used in cardiovascular imaging are “a problem for patients, a problem for populations, and problem for the profession. At the doses that our patients receive, there is the potential for increased risk for cancer and that’s why we are concerned,” he said.
In previous studies, the D-SPECT technology has demonstrated unique capability to drastically reduce imaging time which, in turn, allows for ultra-low dosing of the radiopharmaceutical agents required to perform myocardial perfusion imaging.
“Satisfying the need to reduce radiation exposure to patients and medical personnel has been Spectrum’s goal for the last several years,” said Josh Gurewitz, vice president of sales and marketing. “We currently have sites using as little as 3 mCi of Tc-99m and getting exceptional imaging quality with a 10-minute scan.”
According to Daniel S. Berman, MD, director of cardiac imaging at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, reducing the dose of radiopharmaceuticals as much as possible represents a significant advance in MPI imaging. “It will be a major benefit for nuclear cardiology to achieve high imaging quality using ultra-low doses of radiopharmaceutical agents. With this approach, the amount of radiation exposure with nuclear cardiology studies could approach that of background radiation,” he said.
Gurewitz also noted that in the wake of the global shortage Tc-99m, using lower doses can alleviate cancellations and delays in cardiac scans for many patients. In addition to lowering radiation exposure to patients and technologists, using less Tc-99m in each procedure will enable nuclear medicine facilities to perform more studies every day.
About D-SPECTD-SPECT’S BroadView imaging technology provides significantly improved sensitivity by collecting photons using larger collection angles, a novel design of scanning solid state detectors and proprietary image reconstruction techniques. This technology has produced an imaging platform capable of acquiring patient data up to 10 times faster than a conventional sodium iodide based system, and with up to twice the resolution. The camera was first introduced at the 2005 RSNA meeting in Chicago.
Key D-SPECT features include:
• Shortened acquisition times for improved workflow• Improved patient comfort due to less camera time and a comfortable imaging chair • Reduction in radiation dose by using lower doses of radiopharmaceuticals and slightly longer acquisition times • Improved spatial resolution for better image quality• Simultaneous imaging of a combination of radiopharmaceuticals for an ultra-fast simultaneous dual isotope stress/rest study• Personalized scanning allowing for unique patient physical and physiological characteristics.
About Spectrum Dynamics Based in Orangeburg, NY, Spectrum Dynamics is a pioneering medical device company that has developed an innovative high definition functional imaging technology that provides high speed, high resolution nuclear images in compact systems well suited to meet the clinical and workflow demands of this growing market. Spectrum Dynamics BroadView™ technology, based on a new scanning design and novel image reconstruction algorithms enables up to a 10 fold increase in sensitivity and a significant improvement in image reconstruction quality and spectral resolution
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