Greatest opportunities for growth in nuclear cardiology

Excerpt

The indispensable factor of sustaining any field of science or intellectual endeavor is the influx of new ideas and solutions to previously unsolved, but in principle solvable problems. Over the last four decades, myocardial perfusion imaging has been the dominant procedure in nuclear cardiology. A number of clinical trials have demonstrated the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of gated myocardial perfusion studies with SPECT or PET, and its relevance for patient management.1‐3 However, it has become increasingly apparent that in the hands of the specialists, nuclear cardiology has grown progressively narrower (limited to myocardial perfusion imaging) rather than wider, extending to multitude of potential metabolic and molecular targets that can be explored for the diagnosis and treatment of various heart diseases. …