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Journal of Nuclear Cardiology
Published in: Journal of Nuclear Cardiology 4/2010

Open Access 01-08-2010 | Review Article

Anatomy and physiology of coronary blood flow

Author: Heinrich R. Schelbert, MD, PhD

Published in: Journal of Nuclear Cardiology | Issue 4/2010

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Excerpt

Regional myocardial blood flow can now be measured noninvasively in units of milliliters blood per minute per gram myocardium. These noninvasive measurements are not confined to a specific imaging modality but are available with MRI, CT, and PET, although, thus far, most investigations of the coronary circulation in humans have employed PET flow measurements. Flow estimates with these different imaging modalities were found in animal experiments to correlate well with invasive flow estimates by the arterial blood sampling-microsphere technique widely considered as the “gold standard” of flow measurements.1-11 In these comparison studies, noninvasively-derived estimates corresponded linearly with invasively-measured myocardial blood flows over a wide flow range, i.e., from as low as 0.3 mL/minute/g to as high as 5-6 mL/minute/g. When tested in the human heart, noninvasive flow estimates correlated well with those obtained through invasively-obtained indices of flow and its changes by well-established alternate measurement approaches.12-16 Development and commercial availability of user-friendly software programs have facilitated the use of these new measurement capabilities so that they are now readily available in the clinical environment for the study of patients with cardiovascular disease. …
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Metadata
Title
Anatomy and physiology of coronary blood flow
Author
Heinrich R. Schelbert, MD, PhD
Publication date
01-08-2010
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Published in
Journal of Nuclear Cardiology / Issue 4/2010
Print ISSN: 1071-3581
Electronic ISSN: 1532-6551
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12350-010-9255-x

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