Heart Nuclear Stress Test Machine

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.

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. Next you either exercise or receive medicine to simulate exercise and will have a second scan to obtain pictures after stress. During a nuclear stress test with exercise you will walk on a treadmill or pedal on a stationary bicycle. This uses a radioactive isotope injected intravenously to measure blood flow to the heart during exercise.

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. The heart pumps blood to every part of the body and it too needs blood to work just like any other muscle. If you have coronary heart disease you may have chest pain during the stress test. In rare instances some people have a treatable allergic reaction to the tracer.

The amount of radiation in this test is small. You will exercise or receive medicine to stress your heart. 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. Cardiac nuclear medicine imaging evaluates the heart for coronary artery disease and cardiomyopathy diseases of the heart muscle.

Your heart rate heart rhythm and blood pressure will be monitored closely during the test. Medicine can help relieve your chest pain. Nuclear scanning of the heart shows how well blood flows to the heart muscle. A nuclear stress test is one of several types of stress tests that may be performed alone or in combination.

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. Isotope stress test nuclear stress test. When the heart muscle is exercised it requires more blood to work harder. A nuclear stress test uses radioactive dye and an imaging machine to create pictures showing the blood flow to your heart.

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. A nuclear stress test is a study aimed at measuring whether the blood flow to your heart muscle is normal or abnormal. It also may be used to help determine whether the heart has been damaged by chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Bring it to the test and make sure the health care team monitoring your stress test knows that you use.

Talk to your doctor and the technicians performing the. This uses medicine rather than exercise to determine if the heart is functioning properly. The speed and resistance of the exercise machine may be increased over time.