Coronary Heart Disease: Implementation Of Imaging Modalities To Optimize Cost-Effectiveness

Background/Objectives: cardiovascular diseases remain the most significant health and economic challenge in Stable Economy Countries. Myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) using single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) or positron emission to-mography (PET) has long been a cornerstone in the diagnosis and management of coro-nary heart disease (CHD). However, in an era of increasing healthcare costs and emergence of new imaging technologies, the cost-effectiveness of nuclear cardiology has come under critical evaluation and the implementation of different modalities of imaging need to be considerd. Methods: this review describe the characteristic of the two principal methods of economic analysis used to measure health benefits and presents an overview of the rele-vant trials published so far on the cost-effectiveness of different imaging modalities in the evaluation of CHD. Results: due to the great variability of data conditioned by facility availability, expertise, setting of patients (inpatients vs outpatients), healthcare systems, reimbursement, systems based on insurance company a definite cost effectiveness analysis cannot be obtain. Conclusions: a multimodalities approach seems to offer better perfor-mances both in clinical and in the economical analysis.