Clinical Utility and Future Applications of PET/CT and PET/CMR in Cardiology

Abstract

Over the past several years, there have been major advances in cardiovascular positron emission tomography (PET) in combination with either computed tomography (CT) or, more recently, cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR). These multi-modality approaches have significant potential to leverage the strengths of each modality to improve the characterization of a variety of cardiovascular diseases and to predict clinical outcomes. This review will discuss current developments and potential future uses of PET/CT and PET/CMR for cardiovascular applications, which promise to add significant incremental benefits to the data provided by each modality alone.

Keywords

• positron emission tomography
• cardiovascular magnetic resonance
• computed tomography
• PET/CT
• PET/CMR
• myocardial
• molecular imaging