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Single‐scan rest/stress imaging 18 F‐labeled flow tracers
Author(s) -
Alpert Nathaniel,
Dean Fang YuHua,
Fakhri Georges El
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.4754585
Subject(s) - blood flow , rest (music) , stress (linguistics) , tracer , biomedical engineering , nuclear medicine , chemistry , medicine , physics , cardiology , nuclear physics , linguistics , philosophy
Purpose: The authors report a novel measurement strategy to obtain both rest and stress blood flow during a single, relatively short, scan session. Methods: Measurement of rest‐stress myocardial blood flow with long‐lived tracers usually requires separate scan sessions to remove the confounding effects of residual radioactivity concentration in the blood and tissue. The innovation of this method is to treat the rest‐stress scan as a single entity in which the flow parameters change due to pharmacological challenge. With this approach the fate of a tracer molecule is naturally accounted for, no matter if it was introduced during the rest or stress phase of the study. Two new dual‐injection kinetic models are considered that represent the response to pharmacological stress as a transitional or transient increase of myocardial blood flow. The authors present the theory of the method followed by the specific application of the theory to 18 F‐Flurpiridaz, a new myocardial flow‐imaging agent. Results: Myocardial blood flow was accurately and precisely estimated from a single‐scan rest/stress study for the long half‐lived tracer 18 F‐Flurpiridaz. By accounting for the time‐dependence of the kinetic parameters, the proposed models achieved good accuracy and precision (5%) under different vasodilators and different ischemic states. Conclusions: Detailed simulations predict that accurate and precise rest‐stress blood flow measurements can be obtained in 20–30 min.