From the June 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The Denmark-based company, DDD-Diagnostic A/S, recently received FDA approval for its QuantumCam SPECT camera, just in time for this year’s SNMMI meeting. Universal Medical Resources Inc. (UMRi), a Missouri-based company that sells refurbished and new nuclear medicine equipment, is the primary distributor of DDDDiagnostic equipment in North America.

Compared to other SPECT cameras on the market, the company says that QuantumCam has lower acquisition and ownership cost, a smaller footprint and higher quality. “It’s hard to find all of these attributes in one device,” says Jason Kitchell, chief operating officer at UMRi.


Kitchell doesn’t think that SPECT and PET/CT compete with each other since each modality has different attributes. He compares it to MR, CT and SPECT—“Each brings its own attributes to the table and is not always so easily compared,” he says.

But not everyone agrees. University of Pennsylvania’s Alavi says that the reason why people moved away from SPECT is because it can’t label biologically important compounds including glucose, dopamine and amino acid. But those radioactive elements can be used very well with PET.

“Sooner or later it has to go,” says Alavi. “SPECT cannot do what PET can do from many, many points of view.”

Myocardial perfusion imaging was primarily done with SPECT but now it’s starting to shift toward PET. When the Canadian Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario shutdown in 2009, it led to a shortage of technetium-99m, which is the primary radiotracer used in SPECT heart scans.

Many cardiology practices have already started to use PET instead of SPECT with rubidium-82, which is used in over 90 percent of cardiac PET scanning. But it has drawbacks – its half life is 75 seconds, its supply is unstable and there have recently been safety concerns regarding it.

New radiopharmaceuticals are starting to enter the field including N-13 ammonia, which has been around for a while, but soon it will be available on a larger scale for PET heart scans. N-13 ammonia’s competitor, flurpiridaz F-18, is also on its way.

Both have a reputation for producing good image quality with quantitative regional flow, which means the images are easier to read and the data is cleaner. But so far, flurpiridaz has only been used on about 900 subjects with more studies in the works, so right now its full impact is yet to be determined.

Even though PET comes with a much higher price tag than SPECT, Alavi still believes that it’s worth the money. “If you have a cheaper [system] that is only accurate 60 percent of the time, you are defeating yourself by not diagnosing that 40 percent that is going to kill the patient and cost society more money at the end,” he says.

June 2014 Magazine

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