Combining Clinical and Thallium Data Optimizes Preoperative Assessment of Cardiac Risk before Major Vascular Surgery

Abstract

Preoperative dipyridamole-thallium imaging appears most useful to stratify vascular patients determined to be at intermediate risk by clinical evaluation. For patients with one or two clinical predictors, thallium redistribution correlates with substantial change in probability of events. For nearly half the patients, however, thallium imaging may have been unnecessary because of very high or low cardiac risk predicted by clinical information alone.