PMOD Cardiac PET Modeling Tool (PCARDP)

The PCARDP tool represents a flexible environment for the quantification of dynamic PET studies of the heart with a broad range of tracers.

PCARDP implements the following features:

• Calculation of anatomical images representing blood volume (BV) and myocardium (MYO) from the dynamic uptake series. Depending on the tracer, early and late images are averaged, or alternatively a factor analysis can be applied (water only).
• Calculation of time-activity curves (TAC) from the left ventricle (LV), the right ventricle (RV), as well as from different segments of the myocardium.
• Fitting of adequate kinetic models to the TACs to quantify the uptake parameters. Depending on the tracer, the results represent myocardial blood flow (MBF) or a metabolic turnover such as the metabolic rate of glucose (MRGlu).
• Calculation of parametric MBF maps (for NH₃ data only).
• Combination of the results to quantify myocardium function in well-defined sectors given by the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology (ASNC) and the American Heart Association (AHA).
• Parallel processing of paired stress and rest studies for a side-by-side comparison.
• Generation of a normals database from a set of quantification results obtained from healthy volunteers. Patient data can then be compared against the normal database to quantify deviations in terms of z-score values.