Staging of portal hypertension and portosystemic shunts using dynamic nuclear medicine investigations.

Aim: To explore portal hypertension and portosystemic shunts and to stage chronic liver disease (CLD) based on the pathophysiology of portal hemodynamics.

Methods: Per-rectal portal scintigraphy (PRPS) was performed on 312 patients with CLD and liver angioscintigraphy (LAS) on 231 of them. The control group included 25 healthy subjects.

Nuclear medicine dynamic investigations of diffuse chronic liver diseases and portal hypertension.

Radio-isotopic techniques may be useful in diagnosis and staging of chronic diffuse liver diseases. Liver angioscintigraphy (LAS) and per-rectal portal scintigraphy (PRPS) are at well discriminating portal hypertension (PHT), very early cirrhosis hemodynamic failure and compensatory arterialisation of liver perfusion. Supplied information is related to PHT, liver morphology and mesenchimal activity in liver, spleen and bone marrow.

Liver angioscintigraphy: clinical applications.

Liver angioscintigraphy (LAS) is a radio-isotope method for the investigation of liver perfusion and its alteration in various hepatic diseases. It measures the arterial and portal venous fractions of total liver blood flow. The percentage of liver blood flow supplied by hepatic artery is estimated mathematically by the hepatic perfusion index (HPI), normally between 25 % and 40 %.

[The determination by computed scintigraphy of the evacuation time of the resected stomach under the administration of salbutamol and dopamine].

The evacuation time (T1/2) of the stomach was determined in the patients with partial gastric resection by a sequential computerized scintigraphic method. The effect of Salbutamol and Dopamine was followed on T1/2 and the scintigraphic surface of the stomach (appreciated indirectly by measuring the longitudinal and transversal diameters). Salbutamol prolongs significantly T1/2, from 6.

The clearance of colloidal particles by Kupffer cells in collagen disease.

The Kupffer cells clearance of colloidal 198Au particles with a diameter of 200-300 A was estimated in 14 subjects with different collagen diseases: 7 without previous treatment and 7 under immunodepressive treatment compared to 10 controls. No difference between the subjects with collagen disease and controls was observed. The group with collagen disease under immunodepressive treatment has lower Kupffer cells clearance for colloidal gold particles than non-treated patients, without statistical significance.