Diagnostic efficiency of quantification of myocardial blood flow and coronary flow reserve with CZT dynamic SPECT imaging for patients with suspected coronary artery disease: a comparative study with traditional semi-quantitative evaluation

BACKGROUND: Myocardial blood flow (MBF) quantitation with cadmium-zinc-telluride (CZT) dynamic single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is being increasingly investigated toward clinical utilization. METHODS: In this prospective study, forty-nine patients with suspected or known coronary artery disease (CAD) underwent a rest/adenosine triphosphate (ATP) stress dynamic and routine gated myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) by CZT SPECT and then received coronary angiography (CAG). Quantitative diagnosis from the dynamic SPECT and a flow diagram was automatically obtained by the dedicated software and compared with the result of semi-quantitative analysis with gated MPI using the angiographic stenosis as the reference standard. RESULTS: When stenosis ≥50% was considered at the participant level, the sensitivity (SN), specificity (SP), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and accuracy (AC) of the quantitative diagnosis were higher than semi-quantitative method as (84.4% vs. 65.6%, 88.2% vs. 70.6%, 93.1% vs. 80.8%, 75.0% vs. 52.2%, 85.7% vs. 67.3%) (all P