[Left ventricular systolic and diastolic functions evaluated by the computerized cardiac nuclear probe]

Left ventricular diastolic function and systolic function were evaluated using a recently-developed computerized cardiac nuclear probe (CNP). We measured left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and ejection rate (ER) as the systolic function, and peak filling rate (PFR) and time to peak filling rate (TPFR) as the diastolic function in 95 patients including 34 ischemics, 38 hypertensives, and 23 anthracyclin-treated after the intravenous injection of 5 to 20 mCi Tc99m-albumin. The reproducibility of the measurements was studied, and the measurements were correlated with conventional gamma-camera cardiac blood scintigraphic and echocardiographic measurements. Reproducibility of the measurements using the cardiac nuclear probe were excellent for each measurement, and the correlation coefficients were 0.96 for LVEF, 0.88 for ER, 0.91 for PFR, and 0.80 for TPFR, respectively. LVEF by CNP correlated well with that by the gamma-camera (r=0.82, p less than 0.001) and echocardiography (r=0.76, p less than 0.001). LVEF, ER and PFR in ischemic heart disease were all significantly less (p less than 0.05), and TPFR was significantly greater (p less than 0.05) than those in the other study groups. These results emphasized the high resolution temporal imaging capacity of CNP and suggested that left ventricular filling abnormalities evaluated by CNP would be useful for the identification of incipient cardiac dysfunction.