MedImaging

Download Mobile App
Recent News Radiography MRI Ultrasound Nuclear Medicine General/Advanced Imaging Imaging IT Industry News

Study Assesses Impact of COVID-19 on Ventilation/Perfusion Scintigraphy

By MedImaging International staff writers
Posted on 04 May 2022
Print article
Image: Study Assesses Impact of COVID-19 on Ventilation/Perfusion Scintigraphy (Photo courtesy of Pexels)
Image: Study Assesses Impact of COVID-19 on Ventilation/Perfusion Scintigraphy (Photo courtesy of Pexels)

A scientific e-poster presented during the 2022 ARRS Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, USA discussed how to prevent contamination and spread of COVID-19 during nuclear medicine ventilation/perfusion scintigraphy (V/Q) by modifying to lung perfusion scintigraphy only.

The retrospective study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center (Chicago, IL, USA) included a comparison of lung perfusion scintigraphy during the COVID-19 pandemic (April 2020 to July 2021) to the V/Q scans performed during immediate pre-COVID era (December 2018 to March 2020) in a large tertiary care teaching hospital. Instead of the ventilation scan, chest radiographs or CT scans performed within 24 hours were used to correlate lung perfusion findings during the COVID era.

As expected, there was 30% decline (154 less lung scans, 357 total) in the overall number of lung scans performed during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with the pre-COVID era, where 511 V/Q scans were performed. Out of 511 patients who underwent a V/Q scan pre-COVID, 349 (68.3%) had low, 142 (27.8%) had intermediate, and 20 (3.9%) had a high probability scan for pulmonary embolism (PE). Out of 347 patients who underwent lung perfusion scintigraphy during COVID, 199 (57.3%) had low, 114 (32.9%) had indeterminate scans, and 34 (9.8%) had high probability scans for PE.

“This study provides a comparative analysis of lung perfusion scans performed during the COVID-19 pandemic to V/Q scans performed during the immediate prior pre-COVID era,” said presenting author Pokhra Suthar of Rush University Medical Center. “We compared the probability of scintigraphy scans in terms of low, intermediate, and high probability based on modified PIOPED II and perfusion-only modified PIOPED II criteria.”

Related Links:
Rush University Medical Center 

Gold Member
Solid State Kv/Dose Multi-Sensor
AGMS-DM+
New
CT Phantom
CIRS Model 610 AAPM CT Performance Phantom
Ultrasound Doppler System
Doppler BT-200
Ultrasound Needle Guide
Ultra-Pro II

Print article

Channels

Ultrasound

view channel
Image: CAM figures of testing images (Photo courtesy of SPJ; DOI:10.34133/research.0319)

Diagnostic System Automatically Analyzes TTE Images to Identify Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is one of the most prevalent congenital anomalies worldwide, presenting substantial health and financial challenges for affected patients. Early detection and treatment of... Read more

Nuclear Medicine

view channel
Image: Researchers have identified a new imaging biomarker for tumor responses to ICB therapy (Photo courtesy of 123RF)

New PET Biomarker Predicts Success of Immune Checkpoint Blockade Therapy

Immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), have shown promising clinical results in treating melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, and other tumor types. However, the effectiveness of these... Read more

Imaging IT

view channel
Image: The new Medical Imaging Suite makes healthcare imaging data more accessible, interoperable and useful (Photo courtesy of Google Cloud)

New Google Cloud Medical Imaging Suite Makes Imaging Healthcare Data More Accessible

Medical imaging is a critical tool used to diagnose patients, and there are billions of medical images scanned globally each year. Imaging data accounts for about 90% of all healthcare data1 and, until... Read more