Cardiac Computer Tomography (CT) in Practice

There have been many exciting developments of cardiac CT study in the past few years mainly fuelled by a demand for a non-invasive yet accurate means to look at the coronary arteries. Nuclear medicine studies or functional analysis like stress echocardiogram provides insight into the result of coronary stenosis but do not provide direct pictures of the vessels. Physiological cardiac motion frequently blurs scans through the heart. Nowadays with ECG gating, higher temporal resolution (with higher tube rotation speed, segmented data acquisition and more recently dual source scanner) and higher spatial resolution (mainly advances in detector technology), motion free pictures of the coronary arteries are commonly obtained. These are still not yet the rule since patient with irregular heartbeats, frequent ectopics or inability to breath-hold are still difficult to be imaged. Heavily calcified vessels are also very difficult to assess on CT angiography.