Congenital heart disease

In recent years, nuclear medicine has made giant leaps in the investigation of adult patients with heart disease. However, the contribution of these studies to the field of paediatric cardiology has been less striking1 because of the greater anatomical complexity of most types of congenital heart disease. Complex anatomical patterns generate problems of spatial resolution due to overlapping structures, which are not easy to delineate. Thus, anatomical diagnosis with radionuclide imaging has serious drawbacks. Nevertheless, nuclear cardiology provides highly relevant data for detecting and quantifying pathophysiological consequences in a variety of cardiac malformations, that is to say, it gives basic information that is significant for functional evaluation.