What is causing the delay in adopting PET for cardiac imaging?
JD: We have vast experience with SPECT imaging, and it contributes a lot to the diagnosis. There’s much less experience with PET, and PET’s growing, and much of the evidence says PET is better. So PET has really taken off, especially in the non-cardiac world. We do 25 to 30 PET scans a day for oncology. It’s very good for tumor localization. But it’s been a long battle only to get it approved by Medicare and insurance companies because it’s an expensive test. We have had to show over and over again that it’s a better test for lung cancer and breast cancer rather than just getting a CT scan, which shows you exquisite anatomy, but the PET scan will show you abnormalities before the lymph nodes get big enough to call abnormal. Now that PET scanners are getting distributed in the medical world, the rubidium, thanks to Bracco and Cardiogen-82, has emerged as a really good perfusion agent for the heart. The one drawback for positron emitters like rubidium is that they have only a 75-second h
