Nuclear cardiology as an imaging subspecialty discipline has thrived for 30 years but almost exclusively with one technology-myocardial perfusion imaging. There is no doubt that the introduction of exercise and pharmaco-logic stress perfusion imaging, first with quantitative planar thallium 201 imaging and then with gated single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and the use of technetium-labeled imaging agents and positron emission tomography (PET), has enhanced our capabilities for detecting functionally significant coronary artery disease, assessing prognosis, and determining viability in dysfunctional myocardium. Myocardial perfusion imaging continues to generate new published studies, although many are related to analyzing outcomes from databases established more than 10 years ago.
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