From the June 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“In the past, it was very limited and challenging to be able to perform quantification on SPECT,” says Fritz Winderl, national product manager for SPECT/CT at Siemens. “With [other] SPECT/CT technology, accurate and routine use of quantifiable information is not possible since the inherent misalignment of SPECT and CT during reconstruction prevents the extraction and integration of critical CT information into the SPECT image data.”

But Siemens’ xSPECT technology solves that issue. It includes xSPECT Bone, which reconstructs the SPECT/CT images with high resolution bone detail, and xSPECT Quant, which utilizes a quantitative control method to produce accurate and reproducible quantitative measurements.


In with the new and out with the old
In November, Siemens introduced its Symbia Evo Excel SPECT system, a compact system which can fit into a room as small as 11 feet 8 inches by 15 feet. Many facilities today are looking to replace their 20-plus year-old systems and Siemens specifically targets the Evo Excel for that market.

“There are a lot of older SPECT cameras out there that are installed in small rooms due to the footprint of the system,” says Winderl. “In order to upgrade the system, oftentimes the newer systems require a larger room, but that is a barrier as often facilities do not have sufficient space or budget to expand the size of the room to install new equipment.”

The SPECT and SPECT/CT market is larger than the PET, PET/CT and PET/MRI markets since the systems have been around longer, are cheaper and are commonly used for many different indications, according to the RnRMarketResearch report. However, physicians believe that more and more SPECT procedures will be replaced by PET procedures. Philips’ Shalyaev believes that there might be some cannibalization in certain areas but that SPECT is here to stay. “SPECT has a solid role — if you look at molecular imaging, SPECT is relatively low-cost and the radiopharmaceuticals are ubiquitous and have much higher half lives,” he says.

From research tool to clinical modality
When PET/MRI was first introduced, it was solely a research modality, but recently it has been making its way into the clinical setting. The last five of Siemens’ Biograph mMR installations have been clinical installations.

“The interest in PET/MRI continues to grow,” says Abram Voorhees, product manager for the Biograph mMR at Siemens. “The early questions about the technology have now been answered by research published that shows equivalent diagnostic PET performance from PET/MRI as compared to PET/CT, and clinical workflows now demonstrate that one can image in such a way that brings the benefit of time savings to the patient.”

June 2015 Magazine

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