Perfusion scanning

Perfusion is defined as the passage of fluid through the lymphatic system or blood vessels to an organ or a tissue. The practice of perfusion scanning, is the process by which this perfusion can be observed, recorded and quantified. The term perfusion scanning encompasses a wide range of medical imaging modalities.

Being able to observe and quantify perfusion in the human body has been an invaluable step forward in medicine. With the ability to ascertain data on the blood flow to vital organs such as the heart and the brain, doctors are able to make quicker and more accurate choices on treatment for patients. Nuclear medicine has been leading perfusion scanning for some time, although the modality has certain pitfalls. It is often dubbed 'unclear medicine' as the scans produced may appear to the untrained eye as just fluffy and irregular patterns. More recent developments in CT and MRI have meant clearer images and solid data, such as graphs depicting blood flow, and blood volume charted over a fixed period of time.

Using radioactive microspheres is an older method of measuring perfusion than the more recent imaging techniques. This process involves labeling microspheres with radioactive isotopes and injecting these into the test subject. Perfusion measurements are taken by comparing the radioactivity of selected regions within the body to radioactivity of blood samples withdrawn at the time of microsphere injection.

Later, techniques were developed to substitute radioactively labeled microspheres for fluorescent microspheres.

The method by which perfusion to an organ measured by CT is still a relatively new concept, although the original framework and principles were concretely laid out as early as 1980 by Leon Axel at University of California San Francisco. It is most commonly carried out for neuroimaging using dynamic sequential scanning of a pre-selected region of the brain during the injection of a bolus of iodinated contrast material as it travels through the vasculature. Various mathematical models can then be used to process the raw temporal data to ascertain quantitative information such as rate of cerebral blood flow (CBF) following an ischemic stroke or aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage. Practical CT perfusion as performed on modern CT scanners was first described by Ken Miles, Mike Hayball and Adrian Dixon from Cambridge UK and subsequently developed by many individuals including Matthias Koenig and Ernst Klotz in Germany, and later by Max Wintermark in Switzerland and Ting-Yim Lee in Ontario, Canada.

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