tailieunhanh - Seminars in Nuclear Medicine

AS RECENTLY AS a few years ago, many nuclear medicine physicians would have taken the position that Cardiovascular Nuclear Medicine is now a static field. Similar perhaps in many ways to bone imaging, they would have suggested that all that is left to do is to make some detailed refinements of the techniques, but the big discoveries had been made. This issue and the second part of this issue of Seminars in Nuclear Medicine will certainly discredit that point of view. There are many, many new developments in this field | Seminars in Nuclear Medicine VOL XXIX NO 3 JULY 1999 The Coming Age of PET Part 1 Letter From the Editors As RECENTLY AS a few years ago many . nuclear medicine physicians would have taken the position that Cardiovascular Nuclear Medicine is now a static field. Similar perhaps in many ways to bone imaging they would have suggested that all that is left to do is to make some detailed refinements of the techniques but the big discoveries had been made. This issue and the second part of this issue of Seminars in Nuclear Medicine will certainly discredit that point of view. There are many many new developments in this field. Many new technetium labeled agents for heart imaging are under investigation and these are reviewed in the article by Dr. Jain. Technetium-99m Sestamibi which came to dominate the field of cardiac imaging much like thallium had earlier now has a challenger in the form of technetium-99m tetrofos-min. Thallium also has retained a significant position in cardiac imaging. It remains to be seen whether the newer agents such as technetium-NOET also will achieve a significant clinical role. In addition to these compounds radioiodinated free fatty acid tracers have been under intensive investigation and are reviewed in a clearly detailed article by Dr. Corbett. They have many attractive features and a great potential for clinical application. We have a beautifully detailed contribution from Drs. Galt Cullom and Garcia that discusses attenuation and scatter compensation in myocardial perfusion SPECT. This article nicely complements the review of nuclear cardiology in terms of quantitation of SPECT images as presented by Dr. Watson. Other important aspects of nuclear cardiology that are also included in the first part of this two-part Seminars in Nuclear Medicine are a review of gated SPECT which provides additional functional information about routinely obtained perfusion images. We have included some material on myocardial infarct imaging and the .