CRANBERRY TWP — Roughly 40 patients a month visit UPMC Passavant-Cranberry for a nuclear cardiac stress test.

But the hospital hopes to accommodate more visits with a new D-SPECT system that physicians say have numerous upsides for patient comfort, speed and imaging.

Unlike the hospital's previous cardiac camera, Passavant's D-SPECT camera gives patients the option to sit up during cardiac imaging, which Dr. Lydia Davis, medical director of the cardiac stress test lab and nuclear cardiac imaging at UPMC Passavant, said provides benefits for both patients and doctors.

With the older system, Davis said, the patient had to lie down and hold their arms above their head. That's uncomfortable, particularly during a roughly 15- to 20-minute scan, and can result in a suboptimal reading, she added.

The D-SPECT, however, takes images when the patient sits upright, and they can choose to rest their arms on the scanner or raise them above their head. Davis said this not only lets patients be more comfortable, but adds diagnostic value as well. By taking images in an upright position, there's less likelihood of shadows or artifacts, leading to an easier reading of the images.

Sometimes a shadow from soft tissue or artifacts from the diaphragm — the muscle in the abdomen that controls breathing on which the heart rests — can lead to difficulty in reading the scans, she said. Not so with the new system.

In terms of comfort, the new machine cuts the scan time more than in half, from 15 to 20 minutes to four to six minutes.

It also doesn't cause claustrophobia in the same way as the old system. The D-SPECT is simply a chair with an imaging device that is brought to the patient's chest, whereas the old system was more akin to an MRI machine.

“The chair and the ability to sit upright will be more comfortable for people,” Davis added.

Additionally, the new system accommodates patients regardless of their weight. It has a weight capacity of 1,000 pounds, significantly higher than the older machine. The higher weight limit, Davis said, allows more patients to be accommodated in Cranberry, rather than have to travel to McCandless.

“If we can keep patients up in Cranberry rather than bring them to Passavant (McCandless), that's better for the patient, that's better for the hospital,” she said.

Rebecca Werner, supervisor of imaging services at Passavant-Cranberry, laid out another benefit: It keeps the patient's exposure to radiation at a minimum.

These types of tests are almost inverse from typical imaging such as X-rays or CT scans. In those scans, Werner said, the machine sends small amounts of radiation into the body to take images.

But in a nuclear cardiac scan, the machine reads the small amounts of radiation sent out by the tracer, a technetium isotope injected into the body that emits gamma rays to allow imaging of blood flow and other bodily parts and functions not normally seen on a radiograph.

While the tracer is a tiny amount of radiation to begin with, the D-SPECT and its newer CZT crystal technologies allows them to use less technetium than they would have with the other machine, Werner said, further minimizing the risk to the patient.