Performance of a fully automated program for measurement of left ventricular ejection fraction.

A fully automated program developed by us for measurement of left ventricular ejection fraction from equilibrium gated blood pool studies was evaluated in 130 additional patients. Both 6-min (130 studies) and 2-min (142 studies in 31 patients) gated blood pool studies were acquired and processed. The program successfully generated ejection fractions in 86% of the studies. These automatically generated ejection fractions were compared with ejection fractions derived from manually drawn regions of interest. When studies were acquired for 6-min with the patient at rest, the correlation between automated and manual ejection fractions was 0.92. When studies were acquired for 2-min, both at rest and during bicycle exercise, the correlation was 0.81. In 25 studies from patients who also underwent contrast ventriculography, the program successfully generated regions of interest in 22 (88%). The correlation between the ejection fraction determined by contrast ventriculography and the automatically generated radionuclide ejection fraction was 0.79.