Nuclear Cardiology

THE application of nuclear-medicine techniques to cardiovascular disease is particularly appropriate because these procedures are essentially noninvasive and provide critical physiologic data that are generally unavailable by other techniques. Nuclear-cardiology techniques can be divided into three broad categories. The first involves the evaluation of myocardial perfusion and cellular viability; these studies employ radionuclides that pass through the capillary network and concentrate within myocardial cells on the basis of blood flow or the degree of necrosis or both. The second category uses radioactive tracers that have been derived specifically for imaging on the basis of their biologic activity; these techniques involve . . .