BACKGROUND Adenosine has been available for use in myocardial perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) in Japan since 2005. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the safety of and tolerance to thallium-201 myocardial perfusion SPECT with intravenous adenosine infusion in Japanese patients with suspected coronary artery disease. METHODS AND RESULTS Two hundred and six c...

The aim of the study was to evaluate the performance of multislice computed tomography (MSCT) for the detection and semiquantitative analysis of healed myocardial infarct in comparison to single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). Recently, MSCT was shown to allow detection of myocardial infarct by the presence of hypoenhanced areas. However, direct comparisons to other imaging modalit...

BACKGROUND The heart may be involved in children affected with sickle cell disease (SCD) via several mechanisms. Principally, chronic anaemia increases cardiac output and may cause left ventricular enlargement and cardiac insufficiency. AIMS To investigate whether the heart also suffers from ischaemia in SCD, as has already been shown for other organs (bone, brain, etc), and to look for risk ...

INTRODUCTION Myocardial reperfusion during the course of an acute myocardial infarction improves patients' short- and long-term prognosis; coronary blood flow is successfully re-established while preserving a large amount of at-risk muscle. Clinical evolution, however, varies. Presence of residual ischemia or viable myocardial tissue affects a patient's prognosis. Assessment by noninvasive meth...

Introduction: We aimed to assess whether the vasodilator effect of oral dipyridamole on the left ventricular systolic function in patients with suspected CAD is different from that of intravenous (IV) dipyridamole using Tc-99m MIBI myocardial perfusion gated SPECT. Methods: Eighty-nine patients (17 male, 72 female; 61±10 years) were enrolled in this study. The patients underwent a dipyridamole ...

Background: Real cardiac phantoms are often used to assess the performance of software for gated single-photon emission computed tomography(SPECT). However, these phantoms have disadvantages in that they are not very similar to actual hearts and setting a perfusion defect is not easy. To overcome these problems, we developed a digital myocardial phantom, named%Myo-Simu'. The aims of this study ...

Monte Carlo algorithms have a growing impact on nuclear medicine reconstruction processes. One of the main limitations myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) is effective mitigation scattering component, which particularly challenging in Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT). In SPECT, no timing information can be retrieved to locate primary source photons. methods allow an event-by-ev...

Background The most relevant parameters for the assessment of coronary artery disease (CAD) are myocardial perfusion and the status of the coronary arteries. 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. However, SPECT and CT expose the patient to ionizing...

BACKGROUND Computed tomography coronary angiography (CTA) has been shown to be accurate in detecting anatomic coronary arterial obstruction, but is limited for the detection of myocardial ischemia. The primary aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of 320-row computed tomography perfusion imaging (CTP) to detect atherosclerosis causing myocardial ischemia. METHODS AND RESULTS Fifty symp...

OBJECTIVE Attenuation artifacts adversely affect the diagnostic accuracy of myocardial perfusion imaging. We assessed the clinical usefulness of X-ray CT based attenuation correction (AC) in patients undergoing myocardial perfusion imaging by comparing their myocardial AC- and non-corrected (NC) SPECT images with the coronary angiography (CAG). METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the myocardi...