Reliability of liver scintigraphy in diagnosis of focal lesions

A retrospective confrontation study was made to verify the validity of scintigraphic examinations of focal lesions in routine operation not using scintillation cameras and computer processing and without radiopharmaceuticals for positive scintigraphy. A sample was studied of 400 patients suffering from tumours of the liver. The study showed that the reliability of the method does not reach 90%. The causes of errors mainly lie in the technical processing of the scintigram, much less in its evaluation. A certain reserve of reliability of the method is the use of positive scintigraphy or emission tomography. (author)