Nader Mafi and Nicholas Dodd
Background: Currently the best intervention after injection of 99mTc-HDP is drinking plenty of fluid with no specific amount or time limit. The previous studies did show some but not significant improvement between image qualities of patients who drank water compared to those who did not drink. We aim to investigate if increased and more rapid fluid intake results in better image quality.
Methods: In this study, all patients who had a bone scintigram were questioned about how much fluid they had in the two hours between injection and imaging, and how much of that was taken in the first hour post injection The images were acquired two hour +/- 10min post intravenous injection of 99mTc-HDP using GE Infinia Hawkeye 4. The operator, equipment and radiopharmaceutical were the same for all studies and quality was assessed by measuring bone to soft tissue ratio using Xeleris 3 program.
Results: 146 adult patients with total of 156 images who had bone scan imaging at Auckland Radiology Group were assessed. These patients aged between 30 and 78 (median, 51), were mostly men (61%) and 10 (about 6.5%) had two bone scans.
The overall result, although a small change, was in favor of increasing fluid intake in the first hour which improved the bone to soft tissue ratio by an average of 2.5%. This was especially noticeable in patients who had two scans within few months of each other which could be compared, in this group nearly all the variables remain the same except the amount of fluid intake, this group had an average improvement of 9.65% (range, 2%-19.5%).
Conclusion: Rapid hydration post injection of 99mTc-HDP showed a small contribution on the quality of bone scan images however this together with increased likelihood of voiding earlier on post injection, which contributes to reducing radiation dose to the bladder wall, makes this method appealing to adopt for routine use.
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Nuclear Medicine & Radiation Therapy received 706 citations as per Google Scholar report
