Nuclear cardiology at the door of a new era: better to save mSv or to reduce imaging time?

摘要

The evolution of nuclear cardiology has gone through several clinical protocols that can be summarized as ~(201)Tl stress/redistribution,~(201)IT1 stress/redistribution with delayed imaging, ~(201)Tl stress/redistribution with reinjection, single-or double-day ~(99m)Tc-labelled radiotracers, and ~(201)Tl/~(99m)Tc combined approaches. This evolution covered more or less 30 years with a significant (at least 25 %) increase in the accuracy of the method, but (up to few years ago) a decrease in the mSv to the patient of less than 5 %. Recent advances in hardware and software applied to nuclear cardiology [1] have led to short imaging times and/or low-dose studies, but the choice of the best combination is still difficult.