Abstract
Diagnosis of pericardial effusion by radioisotope heart pool scanning based on the difference between the scintigrams and roentgenograms was discussed. Radioisotope cardiography was performed in total 134 cases for the past 5 years in our department. Among them, 18 cases in which pericardial effusion exactly were noted, were selected for this study. 4 of them were examined by autopsy and others by cardiocentesis and/or ECG and/or venous hypertension and/or the presence of paradoxical pulse and/or clinical X-ray findings. The scintigrams of these 18 cases were piled on their X-ray photos obtained by using a quadrisectional radiography deviced by the author, and the difference between the two figures was examined. i. g. Transverse diameter of the cardiac shadow on the X-ray photos (X) and the scintigram (S) and differences in the right cardiac border (r) and left cardiac border (l) between the scintigrams and X-ray photos, were measured.
Provided that the liminal value was 82 or 83% for cardiac transverse ratio (S/X ratio) and l value was limited to 7mm, these differences were distinctly noted except for 1-2 cases. Accordingly, if these value for the evaluation of pericardial effusion, this kind of disorder could be diagnosed with the higher rate ofapproximately 97%. Moreover, the piling trend was noted in the distributions of pericardial effusion and non-effusion cases, with respect to the individual r-value, however, the two distributions were completely distinguished by combining the two values. Therefore, a extremely high diagnose rate was available by using the decided value made by the combination of r-value and l-value. The diagnosis of pericardial effusion using radioisotope cadiography was demonstrated to be unexpectedely excellent, and more, it was concluded that this method will be sufficiently useful as a detecting method for pericardial effusion because no pain was given to patients.
