Diagnostic and clinical benefit of combined coronary calcium and perfusion assessment in patients undergoing PET/CT myocardial perfusion stress imaging.

Background: A limitation of stress myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) is the inability to detect non-obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD). One advantage of MPI with a hybrid CT device is the ability to obtain same-setting measurement of the coronary artery calcium score (CACS).

Methods And Results: Utilizing our single-center nuclear database, we identified 760 consecutive patients with: (1) no CAD history; (2) a normal clinically indicated Rb-82 PET/CT stress perfusion study; and (3) a same-setting CAC scan.

Reconstruction of rapidly acquired Germanium-68 transmission scans for cardiac PET attenuation correction.

Background: Transmission (TX) scan time by use of radionuclide sources for cardiac positron emission tomography prolong imaging and increase the likelihood of patient motion artifacts. A reconstruction algorithm combining ordered-subsets expectation maximization with a Bayesian prior was developed and applied to rapid Germanium-68 (Ge-68) TX scans.

Methods And Results: A cardiac phantom with Fluorine-18 (Fl-18) was used to determine a minimal count threshold for Ge-68 TX scanning.

A Bayesian iterative transmission gradient reconstruction algorithm for cardiac SPECT attenuation correction.

Background: High-quality attenuation maps are critical for attenuation correction of myocardial perfusion single photon emission computed tomography studies. The filtered backprojection (FBP) approach can introduce errors, especially with low-count transmission data. We present a new method for attenuation map reconstruction and examine its performance in phantom and patient data.