[Utility of the Method for Calculating the Heart to Contralateral Ratio for Cardiac Amyloidosis by Using Ray-summation Images in 99mTc-pyrophosphate Scintigraphy].

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to avoid the influence of background activity in the calculation of heart to contralateral ratio (H/CL) in 99mTc-pyrophosphate (PYP) scintigraphy for diagnosis of cardiac amyloidosis. Therefore, we investigated the utility of the H/CL calculation method using ray-summation (ray-sum) images created by multi-planar reconstruction and summing slices of the heart range from single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images.

METHODS

The subjects were 33 patients who underwent 99mTc-PYP planar and SPECT/CT at 3 hours after injection. Ray-summation axial (ray-sum axial) and ray-summation coronal (ray-sum coronal) images were created and H/CL was calculated. We compared the differences in sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the curve (AUC) between the conventional method and our method, and calculated the cutoff values.

RESULTS

Comparison of the conventional method and our method showed no significant difference in sensitivity and AUC, while specificity was significantly improved to 97% (p=0.003) of ray-sum axial image and 90% (p=0.01) of ray-sum coronal image, and accuracy was significantly improved to 94% (p=0.02) of ray-sum axial image.

CONCLUSION

The H/CL calculation method using ray-sum images had higher diagnostic performance than the conventional method, with optimal cutoff of ray-sum axial images 3.07 and ray-sum coronal images 2.77.