AUTOMATIC-ANALYSIS OF VENTRICULAR-FUNCTION BY NUCLEAR IMAGING

It is estimated that greater than 40% of patients undergoing myocardia l perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) in the United States today are studied using the gating technique, The use of gated myocardial perfusion SPECT is growing because of its ability to provide both perfusion and function information with a single radioph armaceutical injection and a single acquisition sequence. The use of g ated blood pool SPECT is considerably less widespread, but it has the potential to compete favorably with conventional planar gated blood po ol imaging. As a result of the increased use of gating in nuclear imag ing, considerable effort has been expended toward automating the analy sis of gated SPECT data. This review covers advances in 1) the develop ment of automatic or semiautomatic algorithms for the quantitative mea surement of left ventricular function, 2) the validation and reproduci bility of parameters measured by such algorithms, and 3) novel clinica l applications of these quantitative capabilities.