Interactions of heart disease and lung disease on radionuclide tests of lung anatomy and function

This paper considers the effects of heat diseases on lung anatomy, lung function, and pulmonary nuclear test procedures, and also the effects of lung diseases on cardiac function, with particular reference to radionuclide tests. Historically, pulmonary nuclear medicine has been focused on discovering and quantifying pulmonary embolism, but the potential of nuclear tracer techniques to carry out high-precision, regional, quantitative measurements of blood flow, air flow, and membrane transport promises a much more powerful and wide-ranging diagnostic application than the search for pulmonary emboli. The authors therefore define normal anatomy and function in a framework suitable to develop the relationships between cardiac and pulmonary function, with particular attention to regional differences in lung function, since regional measurements provide a special province for radionuclide lung studies