[Methods and clinical applications in nuclear cardiology: a position statement]

Nuclear cardiological procedures have paved the way for non-invasive diagnostics of various partial functions of the heart. Many of these functions cannot be visualised for diagnosis by any other method (e.g. innervation). These techniques supplement morphological diagnosis with regard to treatment planning and monitoring. Furthermore, they possess considerable prognostic relevance, an increasingly important issue in clinical medicine today, not least in view of the cost-benefit ratio. Our current understanding shows that effective, targeted nuclear cardiology diagnosis--in particular for high-risk patients--can contribute toward cost savings while improving the quality of diagnostic and therapeutic measures. In the future, nuclear cardiology will have to withstand mounting competition from other imaging techniques (magnetic resonance imaging, electron beam tomography, multislice computed tomography). The continuing development of these methods increasingly enables measurement of functional aspects of the heart. Nuclear radiology methods will probably develop in the direction of molecular imaging.