In This Issue of the Journal

Abstract

I want to welcome you to the July 2018 issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging . The original articles and imaging cases highlight the fundamental role imaging plays in a variety of cardiovascular diseases as well as signals future advances to the field. Detailed below are short summaries of each of these offerings. Lee and colleagues have attempted to address the key question of whether coronary computed tomography angiography–derived measures of atherosclerosis assessment (eg, total atheroma burden or high-risk plaque assessment) provide any additional information with respect to disease progression or clinical events compared with more traditional measures of coronary artery stenosis evaluation. Data mining the PARADIGM (Progression of Atherosclerotic Plaque Determined by Computed Tomographic Angiography Imaging) registry, these authors demonstrate that coronary computed tomography angiography measures of plaque burden and evidence of high-risk plaque features further improved the prediction of plaque progression and major averse cardiac evens. In his editorial, Arbab-Zadeh contextualizes these results, pointing out that although the magnitude of incremental risk prediction was small and of unclear clinical significance, such information may prove useful in guiding the …