Coronary artery disease

Abstract

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a promising tool for evaluating coronary artery disease (CAD). Assessments of the myocardial uptakes of PET tracers such as N-13 ammonia, O-15 water, and Rb-82 have proven to be useful for evaluating myocardial perfusion. Quantitative measurements of myocardial perfusion using PET have been performed successfully in basic and clinical research (Ahn JY, Lee DS, Lee JS, et al. Quantification of regional myocardial blood flow using dynamic H2(15)O PET and factor analysis. J Nucl Med 2001;42(5):782-87, Lee JS, Lee DS, Ahn JY, et al. Blind separation of cardiac components and extraction of input function from H(2)(15)O dynamic myocardial PET using independent component analysis. J Nucl Med 2001;42(6):938-43, Lee JS, Lee DS, Ahn JY, et al. Generation of parametric image of regional myocardial blood flow using H(2)(15)O dynamic PET and a linear least-squares method. J Nucl Med 2005;46(10):1687-95). Because of its high accuracy at detecting jeopardized myocardial perfusion, PET is viewed with promise with respect to the noninvasive diagnosis of CAD (Demer LL, Gould KL, Goldstein RA, et al. Assessment of coronary artery disease severity by positron emission tomography. Comparison with quantitative arteriography in 193 patients. Circulation 1989;79(4):825-35). Furthermore, the integration of function and anatomy as offered by state-of-the-art PET/CT demonstrates the potential clinical utility of PET/CT (Cho IH, Kong EJ. Myocardial Perfusion PET. Nucl Med Mol Imaging 2009;43(3):207-14).