Comparison of the myocardial clearance of endothelial progenitor cells injected early versus late into reperfused or sustained occlusion myocardial infarction.

Stem cell transplantation following AMI has shown promise for the repair or reduction of the amount of myocardial injury. There is some evidence that these treatment effects appear to be directly correlated to cell residence time. This study aims to assess the effects of (a) the timing of stem cell injection following myocardial infarction, and (b) flow milieu, on cell residence times at the site of transplantation by comparing three time points (day of infarction, week 1 and week 4-5), and two models of acute myocardial infarction (sustained occlusion or reperfusion).

Variable lung density consideration in attenuation correction of whole-body PET/MRI.

Unlabelled: Present attenuation-correction algorithms in whole-body PET/MRI do not consider variations in lung density, either within or between patients; this may adversely affect accurate quantification. In this work, a technique to incorporate patient-specific lung density information into MRI-based attenuation maps is developed and compared with an approach that assumes uniform lung density.

Methods: Five beagles were scanned with (18)F-FDG PET/CT and MRI.

Hybrid SPECT/cardiac-gated first-pass perfusion CT: locating transplanted cells relative to infarcted myocardial targets.

Purpose: A challenge with cardiac cell therapy is determining the location of cells relative to infarct tissue. As cells are viable following ¹¹¹In-labeling, and first-pass CT imaging can identify regions of myocardial infarction, we evaluated the feasibility of a SPECT/CT system to localize cells relative to infarcted myocardium in a canine model.

Methods: Ten canines underwent surgical ligation of the left-anterior-descending artery and endothelial progenitor cells labeled with ¹¹¹In-tropolone were transplanted endocardially or epicardially.

Comparison of in leakage from labeled endocardial and epicardial cells: impact on modeling viability of cells to be transplanted into myocardium.

Introduction. Previously we proposed a cellular imaging technique to determine the surviving fraction of transplanted cells in vivo. Epicardial kinetics using Indium-111 determined the Debris Impulse Response Function (DIRF) and leakage coefficient parameters.

Comparison of initial cell retention and clearance kinetics after subendocardial or subepicardial injections of endothelial progenitor cells in a canine myocardial infarction model.

Unlabelled: Neither intravenous nor intracoronary routes provide targeted stem cell delivery to recently infarcted myocardium in sufficient quantities. Direct routes appear preferable. However, most prior studies have used epicardial injections, which are not practical for routine clinical use.