The need for an international database in nuclear cardiology
During the past 20 years, the use of nuclear cardiology procedures has spread widely as a valuable means of noninvasively assessing myocardial viability and function in cardiac patients, in particular those with coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure. These procedures are not standardized and may differ from one center to another. Therefore it is difficult to compare examination results from different centres. Furthermore, the parameters derived from a given set of patient data may differ depending on computation methods and applied software. 1 In the current application of nuclear cardiology software, one frequently comes across problems such as lack of specification regarding examination conditions, acquisition conditions, physiological modeling assumptions and algorithm characteristics. Who can tell whether one procedure or software is better than another? The time has come for an international database in nuclear cardiology to fully address these issues.
The history of nuclear medicine tells us much about the present status of nuclear cardiology. Gated blood pool studies started with the appearance of the computer connected on-line to collect data from the scintillation camera. One remembers the first 16K memory minicomputers! Those were times of software invention. It was like having a blank page to be filled. For years, each nuclear medicine center established its own procedures, designed its own software, and created its own output display of results. A wide variety of computer software was designed for the same tasks, and with a common purpose-to achieve better nuclear medicine practice. New colleagues were trained in this environment.
With the growth of nuclear medicine, new companies emerged. Microcomputers appeared offering new capabilities. Each year new chips replaced the existing ones, already deemed to be old. It was impossible to resist the expansion in computer power. Unfortunately, the new nuclear medicine computers were unable to communicate with the older genera-