Monitoring ventricular function at rest and during exercise with a nonimaging nuclear detector.

A portable nonimaging device, the nuclear stethoscope, for measuring beat to beat ventricular time-activity curves in normal people and patients with heart disease, both at rest and during exercise, is being developed and evaluated. The latest device has several operating modes that facilitate left ventricular and background localization, measurement of transit times and automatic calculation and display of left ventricular ejection fraction. The correlation coefficient of left ventricular ejection fraction obtained with the device and with a camera-computer system was 0.92 in 35 subjects. During bicycle exercise the ejection fraction in 15 normal persons increased from 44 to 64 percent (P less than 0.001), whereas among 12 patients with heart disease it was unchanged in 5 and decreased in 7.