Muscle imaging in myositis: MRI, US, and PET.

Imaging is an important tool in the evaluation of idiopathic inflammatory myopathies. It plays a role in diagnosis, assessment of disease activity and follow-up, and as a non-invasive biomarker. Among the different modalities, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound (US), and positron emission tomography (PET) may have the most clinical utility in myositis. MRI is currently the best modality to evaluate skeletal muscle and provides excellent characterization of muscle edema and fat replacement through the use of T1-weighted and T2-weighted fat suppressed/STIR sequences. Although MRI can be read qualitatively for the presence of abnormalities, a more quantitative approach using Dixon sequences and the generation of water T2 parametric maps would be preferable for follow-up. Newer protocols such as diffusion-weighted imaging, functional imaging measures, and spectroscopy may be of interest to provide further insights into myositis. Despite the advantages of MRI, image acquisition is relatively time-consuming, expensive, and not accessible to all patients. The use of US to evaluate skeletal muscle in myositis is gaining interest, especially in chronic disease, where fat replacement and fibrosis are detected readily by this modality. Although easily deployed at the bedside, it is heavily dependent on operator experience to recognize disease states. Further, systematic characterization of muscle edema by US is still needed. PET provides valuable information on muscle function at a cellular level. Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG-PET) has been the most common application in myositis to detect pathologic uptake indicative of inflammation. The use of neurodegenerative markers is now also being utilized for inclusion body myositis. These different modalities may prove to be complementary methods for myositis evaluation.

Yttrium-90-labeled microsphere tracking during liver selective internal radiotherapy by bremsstrahlung pinhole SPECT: feasibility study and evaluation in an abdominal phantom.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of the study is to evaluate whether a pinhole collimator is better adapted to bremsstrahlung single photon emission computed tomography [SPECT] than parallel-hole collimators and in the affirmative, to evaluate whether pinhole bremsstrahlung SPECT, including a simple model of the scatter inside the patient, could provide a fast dosimetry assessment in liver selective internal radiotherapy [SIRT]. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Bremsstrahlung SPECT of an abdominal-shaped phantom including one cold and five hot spheres was performed using two long-bore parallel-hole collimators: a medium-energy general-purpose [MEGP] and a high-energy general-purpose [HEGP], and also using a medium-energy pinhole [MEPH] collimator. In addition, ten helical MEPH SPECTs (acquisition time 3.6 min) of a realistic liver-SIRT phantom were also acquired. RESULTS: Without scatter correction for SPECT, MEPH SPECT provided a significantly better contrast recovery coefficient [CRC] than MEGP and HEGP SPECTs. The CRCs obtained with MEPH SPECT were still improved with the scatter correction and became comparable to those obtained with positron-emission tomography [PET] for the 36-, 30- (cold), 28-, and 24-mm-diameter spheres: CRC = 1.09, 0.59, 0.91, and 0.69, respectively, for SPECT and CRC = 1.07, 0.56, 0.84, and 0.63, respectively, for PET. However, MEPH SPECT gave the best CRC for the 19-mm-diameter sphere: CRC = 0.56 for SPECT and CRC = 0.01 for PET. The 3.6-min helical MEPH SPECT provided accurate and reproducible activity estimation for the liver-SIRT phantom: relative deviation = 10 ± 1%. CONCLUSION: Bremsstrahlung SPECT using a pinhole collimator provided a better CRC than those obtained with parallel-hole collimators. The different designs and the better attenuating material used for the collimation (tungsten instead of lead) explain this result. Further, the addition of an analytical modeling of the scattering inside the phantom resulted in an almost fully recovered contrast. This fills the gap between the performance of90Y-PET and bremsstrahlung pinhole SPECT which is a more affordable technique and could even be used during the catheterization procedure in order to optimize the90Y activity to inject.