Mario S. Verani, MD

Abstract

Circulation and the fields of noninvasive and nuclear cardiology lost an esteemed colleague with the passing of Mario S. Verani on October 30, 2001. A creative clinician-scientist, an ardent patron of the arts, and an ebullient lover of life, Mario died after a brave battle with pancreatic cancer at The Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, where he practiced Cardiology. Director of the Nuclear Cardiology laboratory at The DeBakey Heart Center since 1982, one of the first nuclear laboratories in the world dedicated solely to Cardiology, Verani was also one of the founding members of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology and served as its president in 1996–1997. Mario made many seminal contributions to the field of nuclear cardiology. He optimized radionuclide angiography for the assessment of ventricular function and pioneered the use of the multiwire gamma camera in combination with tantalum-178. His work propelled the quantitative approach to myocardial perfusion tomography along with evaluation of new myocardial perfusion and blood tracers. More recently, Verani and his team studied and validated techniques such as gated-SPECT scintigraphy and photon attenuation correction. Among his most important contributions to the field of noninvasive imaging was his use …