Choosing patients for stress-first/stress-only imaging: Keep it simple

Excerpt

In addition to performing high-quality studies to help answer the question asked by referring physicians, other aspects of providing good care to patients referred to the nuclear cardiology laboratory are reducing the time burden and also radiation dose (which really is part of providing high-quality care). The usual (should we say “traditional” now?) myocardial perfusion imaging study takes 3–4 hours, which is a long time compared to other medical tests patients undergo. Efforts have been taken to reduce these burdens, such as shorter imaging times or reduced radiotracer doses made possible with newer cameras and software,1,2 but one big way to make an impact is to reduce 2 tracer injections and image acquisitions to 1—namely, perform stress-only imaging. …