In-effort perfusion pulmonary tomo-scintigraphies for pre-surgery evaluation of severe emphysema

The pulmonary reduction surgery improves the in-effort tolerance of certain severe emphysema, possibly by the compression of zones of adjacent healthy pulmonary parenchyma. Six patients afflicted with severe emphysema (5 M and 1 F, 20 to 63 years old) benefited at each 3 days by an at-rest and in-effort perfusion pulmonary tomo-scintigraphy (PPTS), after a trial interval of 6 minutes. After injection IV of 6 mCi of MAA-99mTc, in sitting position, 120 projection images were acquired with a single-head camera on a 128 x 128 matrix, with a high resolution collimator. After reconstruction with a Metz filter, without corrections of attenuations, the coronal and cross sections were recorded on films in a standard procedure. These were visually interpreted by two independent senior physicians. The procedure has been tolerated by all the patients. Differences of pulmonary perfusion occurred at rest in comparison with the in-effort condition in 4 patients. In all the cases concerned were the zones of pulmonary parenchyma appearing as strongly injured in tomodensitometry. The in-effort pulmonary perfusion improves in 3 patients and impairs in one patient. The role of bubble and implied pulmonary diseases in the deterioration of pulmonary function, respectively, is difficult to estimate. The improvement of in-effort pulmonary perfusion could suggest the persistence of functional pulmonary tissue. On the other side, its deterioration could express the compressive character of bubbles and thus could be an indicator of severity. The observation during this pilot study of the differences between at-rest and in-effort pulmonary perfusion urges utilisation of a tool of analysis of image superposition (PPTS and scans) to study in a group of patients the correlations between the perfusion variations and the post-surgery development, in order to know better the pathophysiology of diseases and select better the patients