Siemens Healthcare launched a new SPECT/CT system, Symbia Intevo, as a work in progress at this week's Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) meeting.
Symbia Intevo, the first system in the company's xSPECT product family, includes changes the company has made to improve data fusion between the system's SPECT and CT modules. In the past, traditional SPECT/CT systems produced SPECT data at a low resolution matrix, which meant that CT data had to be downgraded to enable fusion of images from the modalities, according to Siemens.
With Symbia Intevo's xSPECT Quantification feature, however, the system reconstructs both the SPECT and CT portions of images into a much higher frame of reference, enabling more precise and accurate alignment. For example, quantitative data can now be derived from SPECT/CT scans, such as a numerical indication of a tumor's level of metabolic activity, which can assist physicians in determining treatment response.
The new system also features xSPECT Bone, an application that enables physicians to detect and distinguish between cancerous lesions and degenerative disorders. Also available on Symbia Intevo is the company's CARE Dose4D technique, which can reduce patient CT radiation dose by up to 68%, as well as the Autoform collimator, which captures up to 26 more photon counts from radiotracer activity.
Symbia Intevo and xSPECT Quantification are not licensed according to Canadian law and are pending 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Siemens noted.
Siemens also highlighted PET imaging of Alzheimer's disease with its syngo.PET Amyloid Plaque application, which combines the company's Biograph mCT scanner with amyloid-targeting radiopharmaceuticals to enable physicians to determine amyloid plaque density in the living brain.
Finally, at SNMMI 2013 Siemens introduced the Explora One chemistry box, a cassette-based product for producing commercially available and newly released F-18 PET imaging biomarkers, as well as imaging biomarkers under development or in clinical trials. Explora offers an integrated hardware design that aids regulatory compliance and reduces lab space requirements, which in turn reduces initial setup costs.
