Nuclear medicine consultation: A useful tool in primary care to enable more accurate diagnosis.

Abstract

In the high volume general practitioner setting, there is a need for triaging clinical questions pertaining to specific patients into ones that are readily answered, and those that would more effectively and efficiently be answered by the subspecialist. In this way, the nuclear medicine consultation provides the general practitioner a physiologic imaging specialist's perspective for answering complex clinical questions. A formal nuclear medicine consultation can be a valuable tool in identifying a targeted molecular imaging approach to answering a specific clinical question and can prove useful in both appropriate diagnostic study selection as well as accurate image interpretation.