What is 'myocardial perfusion scanning'?

What is 'myocardial perfusion scanning'?

Myocardial perfusion scanning is basically a nuclear medicine technique where we inject the patient intravenously with appropriate tracer designed for looking at perfusion or blood flow to the cardiac muscle. For example, we can give technetium nitro ionine system maybe or tetrofosmin, or thallium -201-chloride which basically go to the coronary artery into the heart muscle and tells us how the muscle is being perfused. That's what's called the cardiac perfusion imaging.