Abstract

Cardiac health depends on the heart’s ability to utilize different substrates to support overall oxidative metabolism. To characterize a variety of cardiac diseases, there is an ever-growing demand for an accurate non-invasive approach to evaluating myocardial substrate metabolism. Data obtained from quantitative metabolic imaging modalities add functional information to the anatomic imaging modalities and can aid patient management.

The goal of this review is to emphasize the role of non-invasive imaging techniques (such as PET, SPECT, MR spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging) to detect the metabolic footprints of heart disease. The advancements of models and methods to estimate kinetic parameters of dynamic processes using data acquired from cardiac imaging modalities is discussed.

Keywords: Positron emission tomography, single photon emission computed tomography, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging, cardiac metabolism, metabolic imaging, compartmental models, kinetic models, kinetic parameter estimation and fitting.