Siemens highlights new heart SPECT technology

Siemens Healthcare highlighted its work-in-progress IQ-SPECT as the company’s newest Symbia application, which enables a comprehensive cardiac evaluation including perfusion, attenuation correction and calcium scoring in just five minutes, this week at the 2008 Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) meeting in New Orleans.

“IQ-SPECT offers enhanced cardiac image quality and thus offers physicians more confident diagnostic ability because of decreased patient movement. We expect this new capability to provide organ specific, cardiac imaging on general purpose systems, as it could potentially expand to other organs as well,” according to Michael Reitermann, CEO of molecular imaging at Siemens Medical Solutions USA.

The company said its IQ-SPECT technology is achieved with Smartzoom, a ‘smart’ collimator that magnifies the heart while imaging the rest of the torso under traditional conditions, according to the company. The flexible mechanics of the Symbia S and T gantries allow an organ centric detector rotation that can zero in on the organ of interest; in this case, the heart.

Siemens said its IQ-SPECT will be available for all new Symbia S and T systems, and is field upgradeable for any existing Symbia S or T systems.

Around the web

Several key trends were evident at the Radiological Society of North America 2024 meeting, including new CT and MR technology and evolving adoption of artificial intelligence.

Ron Blankstein, MD, professor of radiology, Harvard Medical School, explains the use of artificial intelligence to detect heart disease in non-cardiac CT exams.

Eleven medical societies have signed on to a consensus statement aimed at standardizing imaging for suspected cardiovascular infections.