Radionuclide evaluation of valvular regurgitation.

A non-invasive nuclear medicine technique for the assessment of aortic and mitral regurgitation may be of importance in the management of patients with valvular disease. Rigo et al (1979) introduced a method based on measuring the ratio of the left ventricular stroke volume to the right ventricular stroke volume from radionuclide equilibrium gated blood-pool images of the heart. In this paper we report our results using this technique. They indicate that caution should be exercised, and in particular that methods used to define the ventricular regions of interest must be carefully examined.