Heart Nuclear Stress Test Machine

Nuclear heart scans have few risks.

Heart nuclear stress test machine.

A traditional nuclear stress test uses a gamma camera a donut shaped imaging machine to take pictures of your heart after injection of a radioactive tracer. Your heart rate heart rhythm and blood pressure will be monitored closely during the test. Cardiac nuclear medicine imaging evaluates the heart for coronary artery disease and cardiomyopathy diseases of the heart muscle. This uses medicine rather than exercise to determine if the heart is functioning properly.

Sometimes due to blockage within one or more coronary arteries blood flow can be partially impeded or fully blocked from reaching the heart muscle tissue. If you have coronary heart disease you may have chest pain during the stress test. Compared with an exercise stress test a nuclear stress test can help better determine your risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event if your doctor knows or suspects that you have coronary artery disease. A nuclear stress test uses radioactive dye and an imaging machine to create pictures showing the blood flow to your heart.

The test measures blood flow while you are at rest and are exerting yourself showing areas with poor blood flow or damage in your heart. Next you either exercise or receive medicine to simulate exercise and will have a second scan to obtain pictures after stress. This uses a radioactive isotope injected intravenously to measure blood flow to the heart during exercise. It s usually done in conjunction with an exercise stress test on a treadmill but can also be performed using medicines such as regadenoson and dobutamine that effectively simulate the effects of exercise on the heart.

It also may be used to help determine whether the heart has been damaged by chemotherapy or radiotherapy. The patient is scanned at rest and pictures are obtained. A nuclear stress test is one of several types of stress tests that may be performed alone or in combination. The heart pumps blood to every part of the body and it too needs blood to work just like any other muscle.

Isotope stress test nuclear stress test. When the heart muscle is exercised it requires more blood to work harder. The amount of radiation in this test is small. How does it work.

Talk to your doctor and the technicians performing the. A nuclear stress test is a study aimed at measuring whether the blood flow to your heart muscle is normal or abnormal. Medicine can help relieve your chest pain. The study utilizes a radioactive tracer to create an image of how well blood is reaching your heart muscle both during exercise and while at rest.

Nuclear scanning of the heart shows how well blood flows to the heart muscle. You will exercise or receive medicine to stress your heart. The speed and resistance of the exercise machine may be increased over time.