Stomach Emptying Scan (Nuclear Medicine)

What it is

Nausea, early fullness and vomiting undigested food all point at the stomach, but they do not say whether it is emptying slowly, emptying too fast, or emptying normally into an intestine that is the real problem. Asking the stomach directly requires labeling a meal and watching it leave. That is what this study does: a standardized bland meal, commonly eggs or an egg substitute, is cooked with a trace of radioactive material mixed in, you eat it, and a gamma camera counts how much of the label is still sitting in the stomach at set times afterward.

The measurement is the whole point, which is why the meal is standardized rather than chosen by the patient, and why the timed images matter more than any single picture. The radiologist reports the percentage of the meal remaining at each time point, and that percentage — not how you felt during the test — is what gets compared against normal ranges.

Why it is done

• To determine whether symptoms of nausea, vomiting, bloating or feeling full after a few bites are explained by the stomach emptying slowly
• To evaluate suspected gastroparesis, including in people with long-standing diabetes or after surgery involving the stomach or vagus nerve
• To tell delayed emptying apart from rapid emptying, which produces overlapping symptoms and different treatment
• To measure the effect of a treatment by repeating the same standardized study later

What to expect

You will be told not to eat overnight, and typically to hold certain medications that speed up or slow down the stomach — the test measures your stomach, not the drug's. Blood sugar may be checked first if you have diabetes, because a high reading can slow emptying on its own and make the result uninterpretable. Then you eat the meal, which is plain and needs to be finished, and you come back to the camera for brief images at intervals over roughly four hours. The imaging is painless and most of the day is spent waiting between scans, not under the camera. You are generally free to sit in the waiting area in between; ask before leaving the building.

Questions worth asking

• Does the price include the labeled meal itself, or is the radiopharmaceutical billed separately?
• Is this billed as one study even though it spans four hours and several imaging sessions?
• If I cannot finish the meal and the study has to be abandoned, what is charged?
• If a solid-and-liquid or a shortened protocol is used instead, is that a different code and price at this facility?