MULTIFUNCTIONAL IMAGING, LLC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NHLBI

Description

Abstract Radiologic imaging plays an important role in the care of patients with a variety of heart diseasesand the ways in which imaging are used for cardiac patients is rapidly evolvingIn the pasthigh end cardiac imaging has been dominated by rest stress procedures for evaluating myocardial perfusion in patients with known or suspected coronary artery diseaseIn the modern agehowevercardiac imaging is playing an increasingly important role for a variety of tasks such as imaging infiltrative cardiomyopathies like cardiac sarcoidosis and cardiac amyloidosisfor direct assessment of myocardial viabilityperfusionas well as for emerging applications such as evaluating cardiac substrate metabolism and assessing myocardial presynaptic sympathetic nerve functionPositron emission tomographyPETis highly suited to these functional imaging tasksand recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the use of PET in cardiac patientsMany of these new and emerging applicationshoweverrequire imaging of two functional features of the myocardiumsuch as inflammationperfusion or viabilityperfusionin the same patientWhile highly efficacious PET tracers exist for these imaging targetscurrent technology requires that separate scans be performed for each tracer several hours apartresulting in high costscheduling and logistical challengesand undue burden on the patientWe propose to remove these obstacles by developing novel techniques for single scan dual tracer cardiac imaging providing accurate images of two cardiac PET tracers in a single scanand making these techniques available for general clinical useMultifunctional Imaging LLCMFIcreates software medical devices that employ patented techniques for rapidly imagingPET tracers in a single scanand MFI recently released the first of its kind product for single scan rest stress myocardial perfusion imagingThis SBIR project will expand the capabilities of MFI s software to support several dual tracer cardiac PET techniquesenabling images of myocardial inflammationperfusion and viabilityperfusion to be obtained in just one scanThis will allow a dualtracer procedure that currently requires several hours to be completed in underminutesthereby greatly increasing throughputreducing radiation exposureimproving the patient experiencesimplifying schedulingand reducing costsThis Phase I project will establish a fully working prototype software medical deviceestablish its initial operating performanceand set the stage for full product development and validation under a subsequent Phase II projectCompletion of this project will create a one of a kind product for dual tracer cardiac PET scanningenabling new and innovative cardiac imaging procedures to be performed in the clinic Narrative Positron emission tomographyPETis playing an increasing role in imaging patients with a variety of heart diseasesbut it is currently limited by the need to perform two separate scans in the same patient for many of these applicationsThis project will develop commercializable new technologies for single scan dualtracer cardiac PET imagingreducing total procedure times from several hours to onlyminutesbringing a host of benefits for both the patient and imaging clinic as well as enabling new and emerging cardiac imaging studies to be performed rapidly and effectively