1967 Volume 93 Issue 1 Pages 79-91
The scintigram obtained on the lung with iodine-131 tagged macroaggregated albumin (131I-MAA) demonstrates the distribution of pulmonary blood flow. There-fore, this technique is often utilized to estimate the relative amount of bilateral pulmonary blood flow on the basis of density appearing on the scintigram. As is well known, however, the scintigram is usually affected by the factors of the scanner used.
In the method to be reported here, which is also applied to estimate the relative amount of bilateral pulmonary blood flow, a specially designed slit-type collimator is used to obviate the above-mentioned disadvantages. According to this technique, the amount of blood flow is shown as a curve having two peaks corresponding to each lung. This method is not affected by the factors of the scanner and is very easy to perform. The authors applied this on cases of pulmonary carcinoma to investigate changes in pulmonary blood flow in connection with radiotherapy. In 5 out of 9 cases of hilar type there was a marked improvement in the pulmonary blood supply. In peripheral type, however, no improvement was detected in all 4 cases.
