From the June 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


When GE spoke with their customers, the feedback they received was that Q.Clear helps them see the image more clearly and it gives them more confidence in their diagnosis. “They’re always using a lot of information at their disposal to make the diagnosis, but having an image that is clearer and a number that is more trustworthy helps the clinicians to be more confident and read through the images faster,” says Shen.

Philips is also making strides in the field. At RSNA 2013, they unveiled their new Vereos PET/CT and they claim it’s the world’s first and only digital PET/CT. They say that compared to analog, digital PET technology provides two times improved volumetric resolution, sensitivity gain and improved quantitative accuracy.


Their digital photon counting technology converts scintillation light directly to a digital signal. According to Philips, the one-to-one ratio coupling of crystals-to-light sensors results in a linear count rate, faster time-of-flight performance and overall better sensitivity compared to analog.

Meanwhile, Siemens launched their latest PET/CT, Biograph mCT Flow, last June at the SNMMI annual meeting. It’s powered by their FlowMotion technology and they claim it’s the world’s first PET/CT system that eliminates the need for stop-and-go imaging.

In other systems, a scan is done with sequential static acquisitions so the table moves to a certain position, stops and acquires the data, then moves to a different position for further acquisition and repeats the process until the procedure is finished. For Siemens’ system, the patient moves through the gantry and continuously obtains PET data.

What’s SPECT’s fate?
Even though these shiny, new modalities have stolen some of the spotlight from SPECT, it still might have a place in the future market. SNMMI’s Jadvar believes that SPECT and SPECT/CT will be around for a long time because not every country’s health system has the money to purchase more expensive imaging technologies.

“People think more of the U.S. market but around the world, SPECT is still very important and it will continue to be important for a long, long time because not every country on the planet is going to have a PET scanner,” he says.

Additionally, there are some questions that can be answered without a PET scanner. Jadvar believes that there are a lot of cases that “can be answered just fine with tracers that have a long legacy and history.”

What may be surprising to some is that new SPECT cameras are still continuing to infiltrate the market. For example, the MultiCam 3000eco, a SPECT system envisioned by Eclipse and manufactured by InterMedical, just received FDA approval. It was designed and manufactured for brain imaging, but it can also be used for cardiac imaging — something SPECT has been good at for a long time.

June 2014 Magazine

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