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

Abstract

The evolution of nuclear cardiology has gone through several clinical protocols that can be summarized as 201 Tl stress/redistribution, 201 Tl stress/redistribution with delayed imaging, 201 Tl stress/redistribution with reinjection, singleor 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.