Systematic Review of Hybrid Cardiac Imaging

The ongoing advance in diagnostic for detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) and other cardiac diseases leads to an impetuous development of different radiological techniques, ranging from anatomical- or functional-only imaging test, such as CCT (Coronary Computed Tomography), CMR (Cardiac Magnetic Resonance), PET (photon emission tomography), and SPECT (single photon emission tomography), to hybrid imaging tests that allow the merger of anatomical and functional information in a single test. One of the most important clinical values of these techniques concerns the possibility to avoid an invasive test as the first diagnostic step. Hybrid imaging improves the diagnostic accuracy to detect CAD and many other cardiac diseases and this has already been validated in several subsets of patients. Nowadays, the spread of this kind of imaging is limited but it is recently favored by the diffusion of the dedicated hybrid system and image fusion software. In this chapter, we will summarize the latest available evidence about the diagnostic accuracy of several hybrid imaging techniques and will provide the points of view of the cardiologists and of the radiologists in this promising field of diagnostic.