Measurement of GFR in children by means of radionuclide techniques

The question arises whether radionuclide techniques can be useful in children for the determination of overall renal function. The answer is dependent on several factors: • Does the radionuclide technique offer an accurate measurement of renal function for the whole range of clearance values? • Does it represent a noninvasive approach, friendly to the child, delivering a rather negligible amount of radiation and resulting in an acceptable cost for the society? • Does it provide information which cannot be given by the nonradioactive measurements, and is it significantly more accurate than these traditional methods? This chapter will consider these different points and will try to demonstrate that radionuclide plasma clearances, specifically tailored to the child, may offer to the clinician an interesting tool in the daily practice of nephro-urology.SCOPUS: ch.binfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Should we stop performing nuclear medicine procedures?

SCOPUS: ed.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Reply to the letter by dr w.s. watson

SCOPUS: le.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Pixel-by-pixel mean transit time without deconvolution

Background Mean transit time (MTT) within a kidney is given by the integral of the renal activity on a well-corrected renogram between time zero and time t divided by the integral of the plasma activity between zero and t, providing that t is close to infinity. However, as the data acquisition of a renogram is finite, the MTT calculated using this approach might result in the underestimation of the true MTT. To evaluate the degree of this underestimation we conducted a simulation study. Methods One thousand renograms were created by convoluting various plasma curves obtained from patients with different renal clearance levels with simulated retentions curves having different shapes and mean transit times. Results For a 20 min renogram, the calculated MTT started to underestimate the MTT when the MTT was higher than 6 min. The longer the MTT, the greater was the underestimation. Up to a MTT value of 6 min, the error on the MTT estimation is negligible. Conclusion As normal cortical transit is less than 2 min, this approach is used for patients to calculate pixel-to-pixel cortical mean transit time and to create a MTT parametric image without deconvolution

Reply to the letter by m. peters

SCOPUS: le.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe