What is 'cardiac gating'?

What is 'cardiac gating'?

Hossein Jadvar (Doctor) gives expert video advice on: How can I prepare for a cardiac nuclear medicine test? and more...

Cardiac gating is when we connect a patient and use the electrocardiogram (ECG) to synchronize the imaging acquisition from the camera system when we're doing cardiac imaging tests. The reason for that is we can actually look at the function and beating of the heart during imaging acquisition. This is important because we can get information about cardiac function with such indices as, for example, left ventricular ejection fraction; which is an important parameter for us to know. So gating is used in conjunction with imaging to give us functional data on the heart.