ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Nuclear medicine techniques were among the first imaging modalities to be used for assessing the results of reperfusion therapy for acute myocardial infarction (1). There were various possible uses of radionuclide methods, ranging from the visualization of acute myocardial infarction with thallium-201 perfusion scintigraphy to the identification of myocardial necrosis with infarct avid tracers to the measurement of left ventricular ejection fraction with radionuclide angiocardiography (1). Moreover, stress myocardial perfusion scintigraphy and exercise radionuclide angiocardiography were for many years the most reliable methods to evaluate residual inducible ischemia. The availability, in the late 1980s, of the technetium-labelled perfusion agents made it possible to visualize the pretreatment risk area and compare it with the postreperfusion residual perfusion defect, thereby measuring the salvaged myocardium (2). In the same years, the posttreatment scintigraphic infarct size became a widely accepted surrogate endpoint to establish the effectiveness of the different therapeutic strategies in acute myocardial infarction (3). More recently, the use of gated single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) has made possible to obtain an accurate assessment of both perfusion and function with a single examination, and has thus reinforced the role of nuclear cardiology among the imaging modalities that can be used to evaluate the results of reperfusion therapy in acute myocardial infarction.
