BACKGROUND Coronary lesions with a diameter narrowing ≥50% on visual computed tomographic coronary angiography (CTCA) are generally considered for referral to invasive coronary angiography. However, similar to invasive coronary angiography, visual CTCA is often inaccurate in detecting functionally significant coronary lesions. We sought to compare the diagnostic performance of quantitative CTCA...

INTRODUCTION Increased cardiovascular morbidity leads to search for new, non-invasive diagnostic methods for early detection of atherosclerosis. Among others computed tomography has become a matter of interest. The usefulness of quantitative analysis of calcification using multislice spiral computed tomography (MSCT) in cardiology has been studied recently. AIM To evaluate the usefulness of c...

• The effect of aortic stenosis on the coronary circulation warrants further investigation because the few previous studies led to conflicting conclusions based on small series of experiments. Moreover, aortic stenosis presents a unique situation for a study of the determinants of coronary blood flow. On the one hand, the location of the stenosis, between the left ventricle and the aortic origi...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Identifying occult coronary artery stenosis may improve secondary prevention of stroke patients. The aim of this study was to derive and validate a simple score to predict severe occult coronary artery stenosis in stroke patients. METHODS We derived a score from a French hospital-based cohort of consecutive patients (n=300) who had an ischemic stroke or a transient isch...

conclusions: the current study presents the highest accuracy value to diagnose the lad stenosis in the literature. results: bagging and c4.5 classification algorithms were drawn upon to analyse the data, the former reaching accuracy rates of 79.54%, 61.46%, and 68.96% for the diagnosis of the stenoses of the left anterior descending (lad), left circumflex (lcx), and right coronary artery (rca),...

OBJECTIVES In patients with chronic ischemic heart disease, the relationship between coronary artery lesion severity and myocardial scarring is unknown.The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between proximal coronary artery stenosis severity, the amount of coronary collateralization, and myocardial scar extent in the distal distribution of the affected coronary artery based o...

he association of coronary artery disease with heart valve disease is frequently encountered and it can be expected that this association will become more common because of the evolution in the epidemiology of valvar diseases. Degenerative lesions are now the most frequent cause of valve disease in western countries and they frequently occur in old patients, who are also at higher risk for athe...

BACKGROUND It is known that 9% to 31% of women and 4% to 14% of men with acute myocardial infarction have normal coronary arteries or nonsignificant coronary disease at angiography. These patients represent a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge. Multislice computed tomography (CT) can noninvasively identify the presence of coronary plaques even in the absence of significant coronary artery ste...

The degree and effectiveness of compensatory changes in the distal coronary vascular bed during progressive proximal coronary stenosis have not been described. In this study, coronary vascular bed resistance and pressure gradient-flow relationships were determined for 157 different stenoses in nine opened-chest dogs by measuring coronary flow, aortic pressure, and coronary pressure distal to a ...

OBJECTIVE Coronary artery disease is closely linked with inflammation, and the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) has emerged as a new inflammatory marker. Fractional flow reserve (FFR) is a well-established method for determining hemodynamic significance of coronary artery stenosis. In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between NLR and hemodynamic significance of coronary a...