Background: Although cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) improves quality of life and survival for patients with heart failure, exact methods to estimate the effect of cardiac asynchrony have not yet been defined.
Methods and results: Initially, to examine whether the phase analysis images in the Fourier analysis using gated cardiac pool single photon emission computed tomography (POOL-SPECT) could be used to evaluate cardiac asynchrony, 19 consecutive patients with dilated cardiomyopathy were studied. Interventricular asynchrony was defined by whether the peak of the picture elements of the right ventricle in the phase histogram fitted that of the left ventricle and intraventricular asynchrony by whether the phase image was described homogenously or not. The patients with both inter- and intraventricular asynchrony had significant deterioration in both left ventricular ejection fraction (p<0.01) and New York Heart Association functional class (p<0.01). To evaluate the efficacy of these phase images for CRT setting, 7 patients were tested before and after CRT. During a 3.9+/-3.6 month follow-up period, all patients had an improvement in their condition, and the inter- and intraventricular asynchrony significantly improved after CRT. The degrees of the inter- and intraventricular asynchrony were related to the degree of cardiac depression pre CRT.
Conclusion: These results have shown that the phase images from POOL-SPECT are useful for assessing the effect of CRT in patients with heart failure, which suggests that it may provide information about the indication for CRT.