Coronary artery stenosis on cardiac CT

Abstract

Nearly 55 years after its invention, invasive coronary angiography is still considered to be the gold standard method for the assessment of coronary stenosis and for planning and guiding percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) [1-3]. Angiography is a two-dimensional imaging modality that depicts coronary anatomy as a planar silhouette of the contrast-filled lumen. Modern angiographic equipment yields a spatial resolution approximately of 0.2 mm in the clinical setting [3]. The procedure is associated with a small but definable risk (<2%) and is relatively expensive [3].