Direct imaging of myocardial ischemia: a potential new paradigm in nuclear cardiovascular imaging

Myocardial perfusion imaging has been in clinical use for over 30 years, serving as an effective, reliable, and relatively simple tool for diagnosis, risk stratification, and long-term follow-up of patients with suspected or known coronary artery disease. However, a unique strength of nuclear imaging is its ability to provide tools for imaging biochemical and metabolic processes and receptor and transporter functions at molecular and cellular levels in intact organisms under a wide variety of physiologic conditions. Despite their high resolution and technical sophistication, other imaging modalities currently do not have this capability. Metabolic imaging techniques using radiolabeled free fatty acid and glucose analogs provide a unique ability to image myocardial ischemia directly in patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease. These techniques can potentially overcome some of the limitations of currently used stress-rest perfusion imaging and also provide a unique opportunity to detect and image an episode of ischemia in the preceding hours even in the absence of other markers of ongoing myocardial ischemia. We describe recent studies using fluorine 18-labeled deoxyglucose and iodine 123 beta-methyl-p-iodophenyl-pentadecanoic acid for imaging myocardial ischemia.