MDCT and detection of coronary artery disease

Abstract

After the first introduction of CT angiography (CTA) in 1992, further technological advances, such as more powerful X-ray tubes, faster gantry rotation times, multiple parallel detector rings and decreased slice thickness led to progressively better and more stable image quality for visualization of the coronary arteries. Today, multidetector-row CT (MDCT) with gantry rotation times up to 240 milliseconds, a temporal resolution of up to 75 milliseconds, coverage in z-direction of up to 16 cm per rotation, and almost isotropic spatial resolution of as little as 0.4 mm allow for high-resolution, accurate imaging of the coronary artery wall and lumen. The quantification of calcified coronary atherosclerotic plaque burden (‘calcium score’) using native scans and the additional detection of non-calcified plaque and luminal narrowing through contrast-enhanced image acquisition (‘coronary CTA’) have established themselves as routine techniques in clinical practice which can be used not in all, but in many patients.