Functional Significance of Angiographic Collaterals in Patients with Totally Occluded Right Coronary Artery: Intracoronary Thallium-201 Scintigraphy

To compare the myocardial viability in patients suffering from total occlusion of the right coronary artery (RCA) with the angiographic collaterals, intracoronary injection of Thallium-201 (T1-201) was done to 14 coronary artery disease (CAD) patients (pts) with total occlusion of RCA and into four normal subjects for control. All 14 CAD pts had Grade 2 or 3 collateral circulations. There were 14 male and 4 females, and their ages ranged from 31 to 70 years. In nine pts, T1-201 was injected into left main coronary artery (LCA) (300 ∼ 350 μ Ci) to evaluate the myocardial viability of RCA territory through collateral circulations. The remaining five pts received T1-201 into RCA (200-250 μ Ci) because two had intraarterial bridging collaterals and three had previous successful PTCA. Planar and SPECT myocardial perfusion images were obtained 30 minutes, and four to five hours after T1-201 reinjection. Intravenous T1-201 reinjection (six pts) or 99mTc-MIBI (two pts) were also performed in eight CAD pts. Intracoronary myocardial perfusion images were compared with intravenous T1-201(IV T1-201) images, EGG, and ventriculography. Intracoronary TI-201 images proved to be superior to that of IV T1-201 due to better myocardial to background uptake ratio and more effective in the detection of viable tissue. We also found that perfusion defects were smaller on intracoronary T1-201 images than those on the IV T1-201. All of the 14 CAD pts had either mostly viable myocardium (seven pts) or large area of T1-201 perfusion (seven pts) in RCA territory, however ventriculographic wall motion and ECG did not correlate well with intracoronary myocardial perfusion images. In conclusion, total RCA occlusion patients with well developed collateral circulation had large area of viable myocardial in the corresponding territory.