Hybrid Imaging Research Paper

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1.7 HYBRID IMAGING
Hybrid imaging is an imaging technique which has been used for many years. It is fast becoming a valuable and important nuclear medicine technique especially in the field of SPECT/CT. The first hybrid SPECT/CT scanner was assembled by Bruce Hasegawa in the early 1990s, while the first commercial hybrid SPECT/CT scanner was introduced in 1999 (Bocher et al., 2000). Indeed SPECT/CT has revolutionised the role of nuclear medicine in modern diagnostic radiology. Recent evidence has shown that hybrid imaging will become the gold standard in scintigraphy technology. The advantages of hybrid imaging are numerous with it capable of simultaneously acquiring functional, morphological and molecular imaging information in a single …show more content…

The main objective of their discovery was to obtain three dimensional images of the organ being investigated. This was achieved by acquiring multiple images from various angles around the patient. Since then SPECT has been commercially available since the early 1970s. SPECT has a number of advantages over planar scintigraphy in that it allows for better localisation of deeper lesions in the body and improved spatial resolution for detection of smaller …show more content…

However, research carried out in the early nineties discovered that 99m Tc MIBI uptake in the thyroid gland washed out quicker that the parathyroid gland (O’Doherty et al., 1992). The examination is based on the differential washout of 99m Tc MIBI from thyroid tissue compared with abnormal parathyroid tissue. Both thyroid tissue and abnormal parathyroid tissue take up 99m Tc MIBI within a few minutes. The rate of washout from abnormal parathyroid tissue, such as parathyroid adenoma, is much slower than that of normal thyroid tissue. Despite their small size parathyroid adenomas have an extremely high metabolic rate, and consequently the uptake of 99m Tc MIBI is very intense. The mitochondria enriched oxyphilic cells are the main cause of this increase in uptake which results in the reduced washout of the abnormal gland in comparison to the thyroid gland (Sager et al., 2014). As a result of these findings, single tracer, dual phase imaging of the parathyroid gland was proposed by Taillefer et al.,

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