Study of Cardiac Function with PET or SPECT

  • Guido Germano
Chapter
Part of the Developments in Cardiovascular Medicine book series (DICM, volume 202)

Abstract

The measurement and knowledge of myocardial function is extremely important for the diagnostic and prognostic assessment of the cardiac patient. It is well known, for example, that the likelihood of 1-year survival after myocardial infarction is directly and exponentially proportional to the value of the resting left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF)1. Measurement of myocardial function has traditionally been implemented with planar nuclear (first pass, gated blood pool) and planar non-nuclear techniques (echocardiography, contrast ventriculography), as well as, more recently, with tomographic nuclear (gated perfusion SPECT, gated blood pool SPECT, gated PET) and tomographic non-nuclear techniques (cine MRI, cine CT). Of all these techniques, only gated perfusion SPECT and PET offer the opportunity to simultaneously acquire information on both the perfusion and the function of the left ventricle, and to do it in threedimensional and quantitative fashion. Since it is increasingly being reported that the knowledge of global LVEF provides incremental prognostic value over that of myocardial perfusion alone2, gated perfusion SPECT and PET are likely to be increasingly utilized in this era of health care cost containment and emphasis on outcomes, and will represent the main focus of this chapter. The myocardial function parameters obtainable from gated perfusion SPECT and gated PET are LVEF, regional (segmental) myocardial wall motion and wall thickening. Before addressing each of them in detail, it is appropriate to briefly describe the acquisition of a gated SPECT or PET study.

Keywords

Leave Ventricular Ejection Fraction Myocardial Perfusion Myocardial Perfusion SPECT Transient Ischemic Dilation Gated SPECT 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1998

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  • Guido Germano

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