Abstract
Background and Purpose: Calcification of the intracranial carotid artery is recognized as a risk factor for stroke in the general population. The significance of vascular calcifications in its relationship stroke mechanisms is incompletely understood. We hypothesized that vascular calcium quantification using CT angiography (CTA) can differ by stroke mechanism among ischemic stroke patients. Methods: From a prospective single-hospital stroke registry from 2018, we identified ischemic stroke patients who underwent CTA. Automatic artery and calcification segmentation method measured calcification volumes in the intracranial, extracranial, and aortic arteries using deep-learning U-net model and region-grow algorithms. Stroke subtypes were diagnosed based on the TOAST classification: large artery atherosclerosis (LAA), small vessel occlusion (SVO), cardioembolism (CE), others/undetermined. We evaluated the relationship between CTA calcification volume and stroke subtypes on one-way ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc test. Results: Of the 558 consecutive acute ischemic stroke patients, we enrolled 388 patients (212 males; mean age 66.6 years) in the study. Others/undetermined (34.8%) was the most frequent stroke subtype, followed by CE (29.4%), LAA (25.5%), and SVO (10.3%). The overall prevalence of atherosclerotic calcification was 95.9% in stroke patients. LAA had significantly higher calcification volume with 809 mm 3 compared to SVO (390 mm 3 , P=0.040), others/undetermined (300 mm 3 , P=0.001), but not CE (860 mm 3 , P=0.958). In age < 65 years subset, LAA showed higher calcification volume with 567 mm 3 than SVO (176 mm 3 , P=0.014), CE (213 mm 3 , P=0.021) and others/undetermined (180 mm 3 , P<0.001). There were no significant differences in calcification volume among stroke subtypes in age ≥65 years. Conclusion: Atherosclerotic calcium burden with a quantitative analysis of CTA images may be useful to differentiate stroke mechanism in younger patients.
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