Abstract
Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death in advanced countries. Early detection and diagnosis of coronary artery disease plays an important role in the identification of disease severity and prediction of disease outcome, consequently improving patient management. Diagnosis and management of coronary artery disease is increasingly dependent on less-invasive imaging modalities, including coronary CT angiography, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, cardiac radionuclide imaging such as SPECT and PET modalities. Rapid developments of these imaging modalities have significantly improved the diagnostic performance of each imaging technique with high diagnostic accuracy achieved in both diagnostic and prognostic value in coronary artery disease. This editorial provides an overview of the diagnostic applications of a variety of less-invasive imaging modalities in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. This special issue of “Arteriosclerotic Vascular Disease: Part II” in the journal of Clinical and Experimental Cardiology will give particular attention to contributions focusing on the clinical applications of these imaging modalities in the arteriosclerotic vascular disease, in particular, coronary artery disease.
Highlights
Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death in advanced countries
Studies based on single center and multicenter clinical trials have shown that coronary CT angiography provides incremental prognostic value over clinical risk analysis in predicting major adverse cardiac events with absence of Coronary artery disease (CAD) leading to event free survival period, while presence of plaques associated with increased risk of cardiac events [15,16,17,18,19]
Effective dose reduction has been accomplished by employing techniques with a radiation dose of less than 10 mSv to as low as 1 mSv in some studies [11,20,21], much effort is still required to ensure that coronary CT angiography is safely performed in imaging patients with suspected coronary artery disease
Summary
Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death in advanced countries. Early detection and diagnosis of coronary artery disease plays an important role in the identification of disease severity and prediction of disease outcome, improving patient management. The diagnostic accuracy of cardiac MRI in CAD varies widely according to the literature, with sensitivity ranging from 38% to 83%, and specificity ranging from 57% to 95% due to variable scanning protocols used in the studies [22]. Recent technical developments in MRI, especially with the emergence of 3.0 T MR imaging system have been shown to be a promising technique for performing cardiac MRI, with significant improvement of diagnostic value for detection of CAD [23,24].
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