UltraSPECT introduced its Xpress.cardiac a new myocardial perfusion SPECT image enhancement protocol at last week's 52nd Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. Xpress.cardiac utilizes the company's patented Wide Beam Reconstruction (WBR) technology designed to reduce scan times by half without a loss in image quality, UltraSPECT said.

One key benefit of UltraSPECT's WBR is its ability to shorten scan times which in turn lowers the possibility of patient motion artifacts as well as potentially boosting throughput. The technology increases scan speed by providing a more accurate description of the physical model of the emission-detection process by removing the negative effect of the collimator line spread function (LSF) on the spatial resolution. This level of accuracy early in the process lowers the scan time needed to generate a diagnostic quality image.

Once patients are scanned, the resulting image data is sent to the UltraSPECT.gate computer, which applies the appropriate WBR algorithm.  Following this, reconstructed data is sent to the nuclear medicine workstation where the 3D image is processed further according to standard department protocols.  The entire process is automatic, requiring no user interaction, UltraSPECT said.