Gold-195m, an ultra-short-lived generator-produced radionuclide: clinical application in sequential first pass ventriculography.

Gold 195m (Au-195m) has a half-life of 30.5 sec and can be produced at the bedside from the parent mercury-195m (T 1/2 = 41.6 hr). The generator produced sterile pyrogen-free Au-195m with mercury breakthrough of 0.75 +/- 0.09 (s.e.m.) muCi per mCi of Au-195m. Approximately 20 to 25 mCi of Au-195m was produced per elution from a generator containing 155 mCi of Hg-195m. We compared first-pass resting Tc-99m angiograms with Au-195m angiograms in 28 patients. The correlation coefficient between the two studies was 0.92 over an ejection-fraction range from 0.22 to 0.83. In addition, we tested the reproducibility of Au-195m first-pass angiograms by performing two studies 3 min apart. In 25 patients with ejection fractions ranging from 0.20 to 0.78, the correlation coefficient between such pairs was 0.93. The nuclide is reliably and reproducibly produced, and its short half-life allows the performance of background-free sequential first-transit studies with unusually low radiation exposure to the patient.