Health Imaging & IT - December 2008 - (Page 24)

MoDALITy UPDATe By Jonathan Batchelor I Cardiac SPECT sharpens its focus Cardiovascular disease remains the No. 1 cause of mortality in the United States, with the lifetime risk of developing coronary artery disease CAD after 40 years of age to be 49 percent for men and 32 percent for women. If echocardiography is the workhorse of cardiovascular imaging for CAD, cardiac SPECT is its partner in the yoke. [ Despite some disadvantages, SPECT imaging can detect severe coronary artery blockages and can offer prognostic information, such as this example of a two-day Tc-Sestamibi normal stress and resting MPI study. Images courtesy of Boca Raton Community Hospital. ] 24 Health Imaging & IT | December 2008 n 2003 Medicare payments for myocardial perfusion SPECT exceeded $1 billion, rendering it one of the big ticket items in the healthcare budget, according to Jagat Narula, MD, PhD, editor in chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging (JACC:CI). The reasons for this dramatic utilization of cardiac SPECT imaging can be attributed to a demographic spike of an aging U.S. population as well as a sharp uptick in obesity, and concurrent diabetes in those under age 65. Approximately 21 million people, or 7 percent of the population in the United States, presents with diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Diabetes (concurrently with obesity) has grown in the U.S. for the past 15 years and shows no sign of slowing down; the CDC estimates that the diabetes epidemic is growing by 5 percent annually, says Linda S. Geiss, the chief of the CDC’s diabetes surveillance. Developers of SPECT equipment and software have kept pace with the modality’s imaging utilization curve. The past several years have seen new developments in both hardware technology and image-processing algorithms that provide substantial reductions in SPECT acquisition time without a sacrifice in diagnostic quality. At the component level there have been improvements in scintillators and photon transducers as well as a greater availability of semiconductor technology,” wrote Mark T. Madsen, PhD, professor and director of the clinical CT research facility at the University of Iowa in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine (April 2007). “These devices permit the fabrication of smaller and more compact systems that can be customized for particular applications.” Of particular note has been the development of high-count cardiac SPECT systems that do not use conventional collimation as well as the introduction of hybrid SPECT/ CT technology. One high-speed SPECT prototype, utilizing nine pixilated solidHealthImaging.com http://www.HealthImaging.com

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Health Imaging & IT - December 2008 Table of Contents The Enterprise News Update Technology at Work: What You Need to Compete Why 1.5T MRI is Leading the Pack Workflow Strategies Aid Advanced Visualization Deployment Illuminating Reading Room Design for Better Reading Strategies Cardiac SPECT Sharpens its Focus OrthoPACS: The Information Backbone of the Orthopedic Clinic Imaging Tools Reader's Resource

Health Imaging & IT - December 2008

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