UNLABELLED In patients with diabetes mellitus, myocardial perfusion defects are often observed in the absence of obstructive epicardial coronary artery disease (CAD), thereby presenting a diagnostic problem. We hypothesized that these perfusion abnormalities may be explained by endothelial dysfunction or occult coronary atherosclerosis. METHODS Prospectively, 130 asymptomatic patients with di...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the value of early resting myocardial perfusion gated-SPECT in patients with chest pain and non-diagnostic ECG in the emergency department. PATIENTS AND METHOD 222 patients (49% women, mean age 61 [13] years) with atypical chest pain and with non-diagnostic ECG were randomized into two groups. Group A comprised 111 patients in whom early resting myocardial perfusion gated...

The purpose of this study was to validate whether dipyridamole stress ultrasonic tissue characterization with cyclic variation of integrated backscatter (CVIBS) compared with dipyridamole stress echocardiography and dipyridamole stress Tc99m-MIBI SPECT myocardial perfusion scintigraphy could predict myocardial ischemia in patients with chronic coronary artery disease. Twenty patients (16 M, 4 F...

Introduction Myocardial perfusion and the status of the coronary arteries are the two major parameters for the characterization of coronary artery disease (CAD) and for guiding therapeutical interventions. It has been shown that hybrid imaging strategies to acquire both parameters such as SPECT with CT-angiography provide an added value for clinical decision making in the treatment of CAD[1]. T...

Epicardial adipose tissue is a source of pro-inflammatory cytokines and has been linked to the development of coronary artery disease. No study has systematically assessed the relationship between local epicardial fat volume (EFV) and myocardial perfusion defects. We analyzed EFV in patients undergoing SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging combined with computed tomography (CT) for attenuation cor...

Nuclear imaging has an established clinical role in the non-invasive diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD), allowing accurate patient stratification and allocation to the best form of treatment. Semi-quantitative assessment of regional myocardial perfusion with single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a noninvasive, robust, and widely available method of assessing myocardial i...

Objective(s): A novel IQ-SPECTTM method has become widely used in clinical studies. The present study compares the quality of myocardial perfusion images (MPI) acquired using the IQ-SPECTTM (IQ-mode),conventional (180° apart: C-mode) and L-mode (90° apart: L-mode) systems. We assessed spatial resolution, image reproducibility and quantifiability using various physical phantoms. Materials and Me...

Background: Pre-clinical investigation of stem cells for repairing damaged myocardium predominantly used rodents, however large animals have cardiac circulation closely resembling the human heart. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether SPECT/CT myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) could be used for assessing sheep myocardium following an acute myocardial infarction (MI) and response to int...

Noninvasive imaging in the evaluation of a wide variety of cardiovascular diseases has gained an increasing role in the diagnostic strategy in current cardiology practice [1–4]. This holds in particular for patients with myocardial ischaemia due to coronary artery disease (CAD) [5–7]. Of the present imaging modalities, single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomogr...

UNLABELLED SPECT and PET myocardial perfusion images show greater myocardial intensity and homogeneity in systole than diastole because of greater systolic myocardial thickness, less partial volume loss, and enhanced activity recovery. Consequently, conventional myocardial perfusion images obtained from whole cardiac cycles have lower myocardial intensity and greater heterogeneity than systolic...