Efficacy of clinical diagnostic procedures utilized in nuclear medicine. Nine month progress report

This study is designed to determine the efficacy of nuclear medicine procedures in clinical practice. Several methods of determining efficacy will be evaluated to determine those most suitable. Nuclear medicine methods will be confined to the study of lung diseases by pulmonary perfusion and ventilation. In addition to evaluating the above methods data will be obtained to determine the sensitivity, specificity, predictive value and efficiency of the test under consideration. These values, corrected for prevalence of the disease processes under consideration will then be compared to the values obtained by the MACRO and MICRO methods and will help to bound the clinical reliability of the diagnostic method depending on the degree to which the several methods trend together. Depending on the practicality of these two methods, in addition to the determination of efficacy, cost effectiveness factors and benefit-risk estimates which are used to apply to radiation effects will be determined for nuclear medicine studies of the brain, bone, heart, liver and thyroid subsequently. The measurement techniques will then be utilized to establish guidelines for the most useful applications of the given procedure so that clinicians will be able to obtain a pretest estimate of the utility of the nuclear medicine test