Radiology, Vol 145, 463-466, Copyright © 1982 by Radiological Society of North America
Scintigraphic diagnosis of tricuspid regurgitation
SS Tu'meh, DA Tracy, J Wynne, MA Konstam, JF Kozlowski, AL Neumann and BL Holman
The authors describe a simple technique for diagnosis of tricuspid
regurgitation. Red blood cells were labeled in vivo with 99mTc and 22
patients were studied with ECG-gated blood-pool imaging of the liver. A
single region of interest was manually drawn around the liver and a
time-activity curve obtained. The per cent change in liver counts during
the cardiac cycle was found to be significantly higher in the 12 patients
with tricuspid regurgitation (Group I) (mean, 4.04 +/- 1.6%; range,
1.3-21.4%) compared with the 10 controls (Group II) (mean, 0.35 +/- 0.16%;
range, 0.013-1.3%) (p less than 0.05). Using a 1% change in liver counts as
the criterion of a positive study, all 12 cases in Group I were diagnosed
correctly, but there was one false positive in Group II; thus the
sensitivity was 100% and the specificity 90%.
