A technologist perspective on half-time myocardial perfusion imaging: A promising new technology

Objectives The well established procedure of SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) currently accounts for almost half of clinical nuclear medicine imaging annually. The duration of a typical MPI study requires a few hours; therefore, limiting a technologist’s daily productivity. A new advanced reconstruction algorithm, Astonish (Philips Medical Systems), utilizes iterative reconstruction which allows image acquisition time to be reduced by 50%. We evaluated our experience with the new iterative reconstruction technique to confirm reproducibility and potential benefit for patient comfort and increasing productivity.

Methods A rest/stress Tc-99m ECG-gated SPECT MPI was performed on 33 consecutive patients for full-time (FT) counts. FT data sets included 64 projections and filtered-backprojection processing. Half-time data (HTA) was created by retrospectively extracting 32 projections from the FT data and processed with the Astonish algorithm. HTA images were compared with FT images in random sequence by a nuclear medicine physician.

Results The technologist successfully implemented processing of the 32 extracted frames with Astonish. Images produced from the HTA were deemed comparable in quality by nuclear medicine physician when shown in random order with the FT images.

Conclusions Philips Astonish software proves to be advantageous to both patients and technologists without sacrificing diagnostic reliability. Half-time imaging will allow for increased throughput for MPI studies and increased patient comfort. The HT MPI is expected to be the standard protocol in our institution.

Research Support S. Crandall1, R. Muzaffar2, W. Hubble1, C. Botkin1, D. Phegley3, N. C. Nguyen2, M.M. Osman2 1Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapeutics, Doisy College of Health Science, St. Louis University, 2Department of Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, St. Louis University, 3Nuclear Medicine, Saint Louis University Hospital, St. Louis, M