Myocardial perfusion quantification with Rb-82 PET: good interobserver agreement of Carimas software on global, regional, and segmental levels

• Published in: Annals of nuclear medicine Vol. 36; no. 6; pp. 507 - 514
• Main Authors: Nesterov, Sergey V., Deshayes, Emmanuel, Juarez-Orozco, Luis Eduardo, deKemp, Robert A., Sciagrà, Roberto, Malaspina, Simona, Settimo, Leonardo, Han, Chunlei, Ryzhkova, Darja V., Kostina, Irina S., Gwet, Kilem L., Prior, John O., Knuuti, Juhani M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer Nature Singapore 01.06.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Blood flow; Cardiovascular disease; Coronary artery; Coronary artery disease; Correlation coefficients; Heart diseases; Imaging; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Nuclear Medicine; Original; Original Article; Perfusion; Positron emission; Radiology; Reproducibility; Segmentation; Software packages; Tomography; Agreement; PET standardization; Myocardial blood flow; Reproducibility; Carimas; Absolute quantification; Quantitative imaging; Myocardial perfusion quantification; Imaging software; Rubidium-82; Standards in nuclear cardiology
• ISSN: 0914-7187; 1864-6433; 1864-6433
• DOI: 10.1007/s12149-022-01729-5

Purpose To estimate the interobserver agreement of the Carimas software package (SP) on global, regional, and segmental levels for the most widely used myocardial perfusion PET tracer—Rb-82. Materials and methods Rest and stress Rb-82 PET scans of 48 patients with suspected or known coronary artery disease (CAD) were analyzed in four centers using the Carimas SP. We considered values to agree if they simultaneously had an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) > 0.75 and a difference < 20% of the median across all observers. Results The median values on the segmental level were 1.08 mL/min/g for rest myocardial blood flow (MBF), 2.24 mL/min/g for stress MBF, and 2.17 for myocardial flow reserve (MFR). For the rest MBF and MFR, all the values at all the levels fulfilled were in excellent agreement. For stress MBF, at the global and regional levels, all the 24 comparisons showed excellent agreement. Only 1 out of 102 segmental comparisons (seg. 14) was over the adequate agreement limit—23.5% of the median value (ICC = 0.95). Conclusion Interobserver agreement for Rb-82 PET myocardial perfusion quantification analyzed with Carimas is good at any LV segmentation level—global, regional, and segmental. It is good for all the estimates—rest MBF, stress MBF, and MFR.