Nuclear medicine communications
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Clinical Trial
Reproducibility of technetium-99m mercaptoacetyltriglycine clearance in patients with impaired renal function.
The aim of this study was to determine the reproducibility of technetium-99m mercaptoacetyltriglycine (99mTc-MAG3) clearance in patients with a 99mTc-MAG3 clearance below 100 ml/min/1.73 m2. ⋯ Single-sample methods give very poor reproducibility and accuracy and should not be used in patients with poor renal function. The reproducibility of 99mTc-MAG3 clearance using the multi-sample method (90 min) in patients with impaired renal function is 12.6%, which is similar to that in patients with good renal function and that obtained with other tubular agents. Whether this level of reproducibility is satisfactory for documenting serial changes in an individual patient with a 99mTc-MAG3 clearance below 100 ml/min/1.73 m2 depends on the expectation of the clinician.
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The cause of the reduced regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the posterior cingulate cortex in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease has not been clarified. In Alzheimer's disease, the posterior cingulate cortex itself shows little neuropathologic degeneration, and a hypothesis explaining such a discrepancy is that the functional impairment in the posterior cingulate cortex reflects remote effects caused by degeneration in distant but connected areas, such as the entorhinal cortex. To test the hypothesis, we investigated the functional connectivity between the entorhinal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. ⋯ These results indicate that rCBF changes in the posterior cingulate cortex may be closely related to those in the entorhinal cortex in patients with Alzheimer's disease, thereby supporting the 'remote effect' hypothesis.
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Clinical Trial
99mTc-HMPAO labelled leucocyte scintigraphy in the diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease.
Scintigraphy using leucocytes labelled with 99mTc hexamethylpropyleneamine oxime (99mTc-HMPAO) is widely used for the localization of inflammatory foci and abscesses in cases of acute pelvic inflammatory disease, which is one of the serious health problems of women of child-bearing age. Early diagnosis and effective management of this condition can preserve fertility and prevent serious complications, such as peritonitis and sepsis. ⋯ We showed that scintigraphy with 99mTc-HMPAO labelled leucocytes had a sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 90%, overall accuracy of 93%, positive predictive value of 83%, and negative predictive value of 100%. Therefore, we conclude that 99mTc-HMPAO labelled leucocyte scans provide a rapid and highly accurate method for diagnosing pelvic inflammatory disease in women of child-bearing age. This adds an important contribution to the diagnosis of infection and helps determine further operative or conservative treatment.
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To evaluate a novel strategy of immunolocalization of human neuroblastoma by targeting the neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM), which is over-expressed on neuroblastoma. ⋯ These results indicate that 131I-labelled ERIC1 has the ability to probe NCAM-expressing tumour cells in vivo with high efficiency and is a promising reagent for the diagnosis and treatment of NCAM-positive human tumours, especially for neuroblastoma.