Admin_NHT Staff asked 6 years ago Definition: The nuclear medicine scan that is done to examine the airflow and blood flow in the lungs through the use of radioactive materials to examine the presence of blood clots is called a ventilation-perfusion scan.
Procedure:
Ventilation part: The patient is given a small dose of radioactive material, xenon-133, through a nebulizer under the guidance of a nuclear medicine technologist.
Then the patient is asked to lie down and a gamma camera is used to capture images of the lungs from different angles. Through this, the location of the material in the lungs can be detected.
Perfusion part: In this part of the scan, technetium-99m ( radioactive material) is given intravenously and the gamma camera is again used to capture the second set of images.
During the entire process, the patient is asked to breathe gently and lie still. It gets over in an hour and most of the radioactive material gets eliminated from the body in 24 hours via urine.
When is it done?:
If the doctor suspects that the symptoms exhibited by the patient such as shortness of breath are due to a blot clot in the lungs, then he advises the patient to undergo this test. It is also done to check if the clot in the leg has traveled to the lung or not.