Stress Thallium-201 myocardial scintigraphy

In this paper the results obtained in two comparable groups of patients suspected of myocardial ischemia are reported: stress Thallium-201 planar scintigraphy has been used in 40 patients (in 26 of these the circumferential profile method was also applied) and SPECT technique in 43 patients, considering coronary angiography as the reference standard technique. For the diagnosis of disease the visual interpretation of planar scintigraphy provided a high sensitivity (8%) and accuracy (85%), further improved by processing with the circumferential profile method (94% and 88%, respectively) which caused a decrease in specificity from 79% to 75%. With SPECT better results are obtained as concerns sensitivity (97%), specificity (86%) and accuracy (93%). As concerns the localization of the perfusion defects any significant differece among the various methods has been noticed