The addition of electrocardiographically gated Tc-99m sestamibi SPECT images to the reading of stress and rest perfusion images alone resulted in shifting the final scan interpretations to a more normal designation in patients with a low pretest likelihood of coronary artery disease, and to more abnormal defects consistent with coronary artery disease in patients with known coronary artery disease. The number of "borderline normal" and "borderline abnormal" interpretations are significantly reduced when gated SPECT images are interpreted simultaneously with stress and rest perfusion images.

This method requires no edge detection or geometric boundary estimates. Computer results are presented in a simple and intuitive format, which is uniform for parameters of both perfusion and function. The method is robust and produces relatively few false-positive results.

This new counts-based gated SPECT method for measuring global left ventricular systolic function correlates well with radionuclide angiography, is highly reproducible, and has theoretic advantages over geometric methods.

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