ASNC awards $125K in inaugural research grants

The American Society of Nuclear Cardiology has named three recipients of its first Discover Grant and Clinical Research Grants, backing projects in PET, SPECT and AI-driven imaging. The awards total $125,000 and will be recognized at ASNC2026 in Las Vegas this September.

Why it matters: - ASNC is using new grant funding to support early-career investigators working on diagnostic tools that could improve nuclear cardiology care. - The funded projects target harder-to-diagnose conditions, broader access to advanced imaging and more reliable image processing. - The awards also aim to build research careers inside the nuclear cardiology field.

What happened: - The American Society of Nuclear Cardiology announced the recipients of its inaugural Discover Grant and Clinical Research Grants. - ASNC’s 2026 Research Awards Program is distributing $125,000 across one Discover Grant and two Clinical Research Grants. - The awardees are Diana M. López, MD; Bruno B. Lima, MD, PhD, FASNC; and Aakash Dhananjay Shanbhag, MSc. - ASNC will recognize the recipients during ASNC2026, Sept. 16-19, 2026, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The details: - The Discover Grant provides $75,000 over 18 months for transformative clinical research in nuclear cardiology. - López is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. - López’s project is focused on the impact of initial PET vs CCTA on diagnostic and therapeutic pathways in cardiometabolic disease. - The project will examine how cardiac PET and coronary CT angiography shape downstream testing and treatment decisions in patients with cardiometabolic disease. - López’s study will develop and validate a target trial emulation framework to compare PET and CCTA decision-making pathways. - The work is intended to support a future multicenter study aimed at improving diagnostic efficiency, reducing unnecessary invasive testing and optimizing care for patients with obstructive and nonobstructive coronary artery disease. - The Clinical Research Grants provide $25,000 over 18 months for mentored projects led by early-career investigators. - Lima is an assistant professor of medicine and radiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. - Lima’s project is a multicenter validation of dynamic SPECT quantitative myocardial blood flow for noninvasive assessment of cardiac allograft vasculopathy. - Lima’s research will build a multicenter database of CZT-SPECT quantitative myocardial perfusion imaging in heart transplant recipients. - The study will combine data from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the University of Rochester and additional collaborating institutions. - The project aims to evaluate hundreds of transplant patients and develop a quantitative scoring approach similar to the PET-CAV score. - The work addresses the need for more accessible screening tools for cardiac allograft vasculopathy in places where PET imaging is not widely available. - Shanbhag is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California and a senior programmer analyst at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Research Center in the Department of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. - Shanbhag’s project is focused on robust development and validation of synthetic attenuation correction for PET. - The project will develop and validate synthetic attenuation correction methods for cardiac PET imaging using artificial intelligence. - Current attenuation correction methods rely primarily on CT and can be vulnerable to misregistration artifacts and other technical limitations that affect clinical reliability. - The research aims to evaluate AI-driven alternatives for clinical equivalence while reducing the risk of unintended bias or image artifacts. - The work is designed to improve the reliability, accessibility and quantitative accuracy of cardiac PET imaging.

Between the lines: - ASNC is signaling that its research priorities span the full imaging pipeline, from diagnosis to quantification to image correction. - The grant mix suggests a focus on both immediate clinical questions and longer-term infrastructure for multicenter research. - The projects also reflect a practical push toward methods that work in settings where PET access is limited.

What’s next: - The recipients will present or be honored at ASNC2026 in September. - The grant projects will run over 18 months. - ASNC may use these inaugural awards to shape future research funding and member development efforts.

The bottom line: - ASNC’s first research awards are a targeted bet on studies that could make nuclear cardiology more accurate, more accessible and easier to apply in everyday care.