Clinical SPECT/CT—Time for a New Standard of Care

I haven't been able to attend the SNMMI (Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging) meeting in quite a while. It is unfortunately scheduled on the first week of June, and even if I can score the week off, I'm usually off on vacation with the family.This year's meeting was in Vancouver, my most favorite city on the planet, so I'm doubly deprived. It's in St. Louis next year, and I'm going to try my best to be there.One of the highlights of the SNM (I still can't get used to the new title) is, not coincidentally, the "Highlights" lecture at the end of the meeting. There are several different sections of this concluding talk, but I'm most intrigued by the General NM talk given by Alan H. Maurer, M.D., from Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I've stolen the title of his talk, "2013 SNMMI Highlights Lecture: General Clinical Nuclear Medicine: Clinical SPECT/CT—Time for a New Standard of Care" for this article.Dr. Maurer starts off with a brief synopsis of the not-quite parallel development of the otherwise similar technologies, PET/CT and SPECT/CT. PET/CT appeared much more rapidly:The timelines of the early development of SPECT and CT are roughly synchronous. The question, then, is why has the evolutionary progress been so much slower from SPECT to SPECT/CT (>40 years) than from PET to PET/CT (<20 years)? Among possible explanations are the lack of separate reimbursement for most SPECT/CT proce...
Source: Dalai's PACS Blog - Category: Radiologists Source Type: blogs