UltraSPECT LTD last week announced that it has been granted a patent for  “Efficient Single Photon Emission Imaging” (U.S. Patent no. 7,026,623). According to the patent, shorter scanning time and clinically diagnostic images may be obtained by resolution recovery reconstruction methods such as the UltraSPECT patented Wide Beam Reconstruction (WBR) technology.

Scan time of cardiac perfusion and bone SPECT studies range between 15 and 30 minutes in a conventional dual-head gamma camera. Shortening the scan time of nuclear medicine procedures while maintaining image quality is a desirable feature for very busy nuclear medicine clinics as well as for the comfort of patients. Xpress.cardiac and Xpress.bone are two of the products that are marketed by UltraSPECT, demonstrating that scan times can be reduced by factor of two or more with no degradation of image quality, the company said.