Non-invasive diagnosis of ischemic heart disease using stress thallium scintigraphy and digital exercise 2-dimensional echocardiography.
The introduction of computer technology has overcome many of the technical difficulties in performing and interpreting echocardiograms obtained from exercising individuals and has made stress echocardiography a potentially practical examination. Additional data, however, are necessary to establish the accuracy of exercise echocardiography. The purpose of this study is to compare exercise echocardiography and planar thallium studies for accuracy in detecting coronary artery disease. The study was performed on 50 patients, 41 of whom underwent coronary angiography. For the remaining 9 patients accuracy was defined as concordance of clinical information, treadmill ECG results, thallium data and the exercise echocardiogram. If there was any discrepancy among these tests, the patient was not included in the analysis. The sensitivity of exercise 2D digital echocardiography was comparable to stress thallium (0.86 vs 0.85) and was better than treadmill test alone (0.66). There were no false positive tests with echocardiographic study, while 1 false positive thallium examination was detected. The diagnostic accuracy of stress echocardiography was 0.90, stress thallium 0.85 and treadmill test only 0.75. In conclusion, exercise echocardiography appears to give results comparable to stress planar thallium studies. In addition, the ultrasonic procedure has several advantages: it is totally non-invasive, does not require a reperfusion study 4 hours later, avoids radiation and is less expensive.
Gentile
R
R
Armstrong
W
W
West
S
S
Ryan
T
T
Vannoy
F
F
Laganà
B
B
Feigenbaum
H
H
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003327:Coronary Disease / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D015150:Echocardiography, Doppler; D005080:Exercise Test; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011877:Radionuclide Imaging; D013794:Thallium Radioisotopes
D013794:Thallium Radioisotopes