Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Children of a lesser god: From radiocardiogram to CZT GSPECT

2018; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 27; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s12350-018-01512-y

1532-6551

Assuero Giorgetti, Paolo Marzullo,

Cardiac Valve Diseases and Treatments

We had the fortune to work in the Institute founded and directed for more than 40 years by Luigi Donato, a pioneer of nuclear medicine, among the most influential cardiologist of the past century.He loves to remember those days in the 1950s, when he, a young research fellow, drove every month from Pisa to Ciampino airport in Rome to wait the arrival of Na24.Then, he was used to put the box with the radioisotope into the mythical Italian car ''Fiat Topolino'' (i.e., ''baby tiny mouse''), coming back to Pisa and projecting his research work.Professor Donato is one of the fathers of radiocardiography, a technique based on the radioisotopic application of the indicator-dilution principle, representing the first successful attempt to noninvasively obtain information on cardiopulmonary circulation 1 (Figure 1).A few years later, Folse and Braunwald described a radioisotope indicator-dilution technique to assess the 'fraction of left ventricular volume ejected per beat and ventricular enddiastolic and residual volumes'. 2It is still difficult to fully understand how these studies have influenced cardiology.Successively, cardiac imaging has evolved following technological developments.In nuclear medicine, the advent of Anger camera and the use of 99m Tclabeled compounds led to implement cardiac blood-pool imaging, a gold standard technique for the assessment of biventricular function, till the validation of computed tomography and cardiac magnetic resonance (cMRI). 3nother revolution started in the 1970s with the diffusion of echocardiography: the investigation of cardiac pump 2028