New PET Application Helps Improve Detection of CAD

October 6, 2009 – Siemens Healthcare announced the availability of syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow, a new cardiac imaging software application for the industry-leading Biograph PET/CT scanners that may have significant impact on the diagnosis of patients with advanced coronary artery disease (CAD) and specifically, with those patients with multivessel disease, or those who are asymptomatic.

This new application is on display at the Siemens booth 207, at the American Society for Nuclear Cardiology Scientific Session in Minneapolis.

According to the “Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics 2009 Update,” published by the American Heart Association (AHA), one of every five deaths each year is attributed to CAD, making it the largest killer in the United States. At least 50 percent of those who die suddenly of CAD had no previous symptoms, and it has been reported that those with documented CAD have five to seven times the risk of having a myocardial infarction or dying than the general population.

Within this large CAD patient population, published clinical literature has estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of CAD patients have balanced vessel disease, and up to 8 percent are asymptomatic at-risk patients. It is especially within this high-risk group that the new imaging application offers additional diagnostic value. syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow is the first and only FDA-cleared software from a major vendor to offer a new method for quantitatively evaluating the extent of ischemia via high-performance PET/CT imaging and advanced applications.

Quantifying the extent of the disease is important in the patient evaluation. In some circumstances, a conventional myocardial perfusion study may suggest that the perfusion is within normal ranges, but in fact, it may not be. Specific quantification of perfusion levels in each vessel can help improve the identification of multi-vessel disease and may mitigate the risk for misdiagnoses or underestimated risk factors.

The new syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow application enables the more definitive measurement of myocardial blood flow during PET perfusion studies as compared to regular myocardial perfusion studies* (data on file). Combined with the advanced 3D PET performance of the Biograph family of PET•CT scanners, conventional static perfusion and the dynamic perfusion required for myocardial blood flow is now possible with single-injection protocols for virtually all patients with no additional scan time or patient dose. A variety of information on syngo Dynamic PET with myocardial blood flow is available at the Siemens booth and on the company’s Web site. At www.siemens.com/mi, a variety of supporting information can be found, including clinical case presentations, a review of clinical literature, clinical primers, scientific whitepapers, and product demonstrations with real clinical data.

For more information: www.siemens.com/healthcare