Hybrid imaging and women’s health

Diagnosing heart disease in women is sometimes difficult, but molecular PET and SPECT imagin is beginning to contribute to resolving the problem, writes Johannes Czernin, MD, a professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. PET/CT's ability to correct for soft tissue attentuation, and its excellent spatial and temporal resolution allows it to quantify blood flow in the various regions of the heart. With SPECT/CT, appropriate soft-tissue attentuation is now possible, reducing the number of false positive findings, Czernin writes.