D-SPECT Camera Brings Dramatic Dose Reductions to Nuclear Cardiology

The need to reduce radiation exposure to patients & medical personnel has always been Spectrum’s goal since its introduction of the D-SPECT. It’s unique capability to count up to 10X the speed of a conventional Anger camera lends itself to either drastically reducing imaging time, i.e. a 2 minute Gated SPECT study or imaging longer, i.e. 8-10 minutes, coupled with a very significant reduction of the injected dose.

In 2008, many of our sites quickly recognized this capability and began reducing doses. This was prior to the first 2009 announcement of the Tc-99m supply disruptions.

“We have sites using as little as 7 mCi of Tc99m and getting exceptional image quality with a 6- minute Gated SPECT scan,” says Josh Gurewitz, VP of Sales, and Marketing for Spectrum Dynamics. In addition, we are working with 2 major research sites to develop and validate a new ultra low dose Tc-99m stress only protocol and an ultra low dose rest protocol. Doses as low as 3mCi Tc-99m are currently under evaluation, and could potentially bring the total patient radiation dose to less than 2 mSV.

The global shortage of Tc-99m due to the shutdown of multiple reactors has put a tremendous strain on Nuclear Medicine departments and private offices.
As a result, this has caused cancellations and or delays to complete their daily workload for patients requiring MPI studies. An important benefit in our ongoing effort to offer the market fully validated dose reduction protocols, is that D-SPECT sites use significantly less Tc-99m than conventional camera sites do. This in turn reduces the radiation dose to the patient, decreases radiation exposure to the medical staff, and creates the ability to perform more studies in a day.

Equally important is D-SPECT’S capability to maintain exceptional image quality with reduced doses of Tl-201, which has become a viable alternative to Tc-99m MPI imaging.

“Spectrum has been and remains fully committed to continuing dose reductions without sacrificing image quality and keeping acquisition times below conventional imaging times”, Gurewitz added.