Dynamic bone scanning in the differential diagnosis of skeletal lesions

A method of combined dynamic and static bone imaging using 99mTc-MDP is described. During the dynamic part of the study the blood flow to specific regions of interest (ROI) on symmetrical bones is evaluated by generating time-active curves (TAC) for these regions. Each TAC is divided into an arterial, venous and blood pool phases and the normalized integral of the count-rate is calculated for each phase. During the static imaging, ratios of averaged counts are calculated for the symmetrical ROI's. One hundred and six patients were studied with the following diagnoses: 25 with Legg-Perthes disease, 6 with toxic synovitis, 16 with septic arthritis, 20 patients with osteomyelitis of various bones and 12 patients with malignant tumors. The use of flow data along with the static data suggests a specific diagnostic pattern for each of these diseases. (Author)