[Evaluation of coronary reperfusion for acute myocardial infarction by emission CT using technetium-99m...

Twelve patients with acute transmural myocardial infarction (AMI) were treated with percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) following intracoronary thrombolysis using urokinase, and underwent technetium-99m stannous pyrophosphate (Tc-99m-PPi) imaging 9.2 +/- 2.1 hours after the onset of chest pain. The imaging was performed with emission computed tomography (ECT). Compared to planar imaging, this allowed more accurate detection of small myocardial infarcts and accurate measurements of infarcts irrespective of their location was also made. Early Tc-99m-PPi images were obtained to test the hypothesis that an early, abnormal Tc-99m-PPi image suggest successful reperfusion. The results were presented for two groups of patients: three with unsuccessful reperfusion (Group A) and nine with successful reperfusion (Group B). Eight of the nine patients with successful reperfusion had positive acute Tc-99m-PPi images. On the contrary, all the three patients for whom reperfusion failed had negative acute Tc-99m-PPi images. We also examined the feasibility of estimating infarct size using positive Tc-99m-PPi images in patients with successful reperfusion during the early phase of AMI. The Tc-99m-PPi uptake score (Tc-US) was used to measure infarct size in this study. Areas of increased Tc-99m-PPi uptake within myocardial infarcts were threshold at 60% of the peak activity. The Tc-US of each patient was obtained to sum the scores of all myocardial segments using a scoring system with a maximum score of 108. Using this method, Tc-US ranged from 2 to 39. The correlation of Tc-US with the peak serum creatine kinase level was significant (r = 0.91).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)