Evaluation of Regional Wall Motion by Phase Analysis of Radionuclide Cardiac Blood Pool Scintigrams in Coronary Artery Disease Patients

Among noninvasive approaches for the evaluation of left ventricular performance, radionuclide ventriculography (RVG) has been shown to be of particular values. Phase analysis, recently introduced as more objective means for evaluating the temporal sequence of systolic ventricular wall motion than cine image of RVG comprises a pixel by pixel Fourier transformation of the time activity curve of a multiple gated acquisition equilibrium blood pool study. To examine the regional wall motion of ventricle in myocardial infarctions, we evaluated the phase image and histogram constructed for each ventricle by total phase angle range and full width of half maximum (FWHM), This study consisted of 7 normal subjects and 23 subjects with acute myocardial infarction. Contrast ventriculography and coronary angiography was performed in all patients with myocardial infarction. And we compared the result of phase analysis with cine image of RVG and examined the interrelationship between phase analysis and contrast ventriculography with coronary angiography. The results were as follow; 1) The total phase angle range and FWHM of LV phase histogram in myocardial infarction (86' and 32, respectively) were wider than those in normal control (38 and 18, respectively p<0.01). 2) RV phase angle range and FWHM in patients with right coronary artery (RCA) occlusion (79 and 37, respectively) were wider than those in normal control (39' and 18, respectively p< 0.001) and the patients without RCA occlusion (52' and 19, respectively p<0.01). 3) Phase analysis was more sensitive (95%) than cine image of RVG (70%) for the detection of regional wall motion abnormality of LV.