OBJECTIVE The objective of this work was to determine the minimum administered activity of (99m)Tc-mercaptoacetyltriglycine (MAG3) needed both to estimate effective renal plasma flow (ERPF) with adequate precision and to obtain good image quality. METHODS Three groups of 10 patients each were injected with 45, 71, or 132 MBq of MAG3. Renograms and perfusion and clearance images were obtained....

Background: Measurement of absolute or differential renal function using radiotracers plays an important role in the clinical management of various renal diseases. Gamma camera quantitative methods in approximation of renal clearance may potentially be as accurate as plasma clearance methods. However some critical factors such as kidney depth and background counts are still troublesome in...

Proteins are essential components in most processes in living organisms. The detection and quantification of specific proteins can be used e.g. as measures of certain physiological conditions, and are therefore of great importance. This thesis focuses on development of affinity-based bioassays for specific protein detection. The use of Affibody molecules for specific molecular recognition has b...

UNLABELLED Because recent reports have questioned the traditional 2-compartment model for calculating tracer clearance after a single intravenous injection, a 3-compartment model was evaluated in this study. METHODS Bayesian statistics were used, which facilitated curve fitting by treating all subjects simultaneously. (99m)Tc-Mercaptoacetyltriglycine clearance data from 154 adults and 109 chi...

UNLABELLED It has been routine at the University of Alabama Medical Center to obtain a radionuclide renal function study immediately after transplantation (usually within 3 d) that includes estimation of effective renal plasma flow (ERPF) from a single plasma sample in addition to imaging. We present here the correlation between baseline measurements and the 1-y graft survival. METHODS Two co...

Technetium-99m-mercaptoacetyltriglycine (99mTc-MAG3) was tested in 82 hypertensive patients submitted to renal scintigraphy 1 hr after oral premedication with 50 mg of Captopril. Baseline studies were obtained only for those patients showing abnormal findings in the provocative study. All patients underwent renal arteriography. Sensitivity and specificity for the detection of renal artery steno...