Residual Pulmonary Vascular Obstruction Index Computed with Ventilation/perfusion SPECT/CT Imaging to Predict the Risk of Venous Thromboembolism Recurrence in Patients with Pulmonary Embolism (PRONOSPECT)

Major risk after pulmonary embolism (PE) is recurrence, fatal in 10% of patients. Patients with PE can be stratified in 3 groups according to the risk of recurrence : very low risk, high risk or Intermediate risk. Little is known about this last group.

Anticoagulation is efficient to prevent recurrence but is currently not recommended for patient with an intermediate risk of recurrence.

Identifying risk factors of recurrent PE remains a major issue to identify sub-groups of patients who would require lifelong anticoagulation.

In 30-40% of cases, PE patients develop residual pulmonary vascular obstruction (RPVO), which has been found to be associated with an increased recurrence risk. This last observation was mostly reported in patients with unprovoked PE (patients with high risk of recurrence) and RPVO was measured using conventional planar lung scan.

In patients with an intermediate risk of recurrence, the impact of RPVO has been much less studied. In addition, the definition of RPVO was variable according to studies and correlation between RPVO burden and recurrence risk has not been clearly demonstrated. This might be explained by the inherent limitation of RPVO quantification using conventional planar imaging, which is only based on a visual estimation on 2-dimensional images.

Ventilation/Perfusion Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (V/Q SPECT/CT) is a new method of scintigraphic image acquisition that offers the advantage of 3-dimensional imaging, enabling more accurate and reproducible quantification of RPVO.

The main hypothesis of this study is that in patients with PE at intermediate risk of recurrence, RPVO computed with V/Q SPECT/CT imaging may be an important predictor of recurrence.