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.
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