BACKGROUND Carotid plaque MRI has been a useful method to characterize vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque elements. Recent investigations have suggested that source images from CT angiography (CTA) and MR angiography (MRA) can identify the simple high-risk features of symptom-producing carotid artery plaque. We studied the correlation and relative diagnostic accuracies of CTA and MRA source imag...

Introduction: Atherosclerosis has been shown to be a systematic disease which often involves multiple vascular beds, such as coronary and carotid arteries . The size of carotid lipid-rich necrotic core (LRNC) and presence of intraplaque hemorrhage (IPH) were demonstrated to be high risk features due to their correlations with neurovascular events . For coronary atherosclerosis, previous studies...

BACKGROUND Although it is known that coronary computed tomographic angiography (CCTA) offers highly negative predictive value to exclude obstructive coronary lesions, the plaque pattern on CCTA has not been fully understood. The purpose of this study was to explore the difference of the plaque patterns on CCTA and to assess the cardiovascular risks in healthy subjects. METHODS A total of 3914...

CORONARY COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHIC ANGIOGRAPHY (CTA) HAS BECOME AN ACCEPTED TOOL FOR THE evaluation of obstructive coronary artery disease, with high accuracy and proven prognostic implications. Although detailed information regarding plaque characteristics is available in coronary CTA datasets of sufficient quality, clinical decision making utilizing the information offered by computed tomography–b...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between the coronary CT angiographic findings of calcified and noncalcified plaque burden and stenosis severity and the myocardial perfusion imaging finding of ischemia. MATERIALS AND METHODS Seventy-two patients (41 men, 31 women; mean age, 56 years) underwent coronary CT angiography and stress-rest SPECT myocardial perfusion im...

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background Currently, no recommendations are endorsed by the different scientific societies on clinical use repeated coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) in patients with non-obstructive artery disease (CAD). Purpose The aim this study was to develop and validate a practical simple CCTA risk score predict medium-term pr...

In Computed Tomography (CT) images of the coronary arteries, segmentation calcified plaques is extremely important for examination, diagnosis, and treatment heart disease. However, one characteristic lesion that it has a small size, which brings two difficulties. One class imbalance when computing loss function other small-scale targets are prone to losing details in continuous downsampling pro...

Atherosclerotic plaque rupture with luminal thrombosis is the most common mechanism responsible for the majority of acute coronary syndromes and sudden coronary death. The precursor lesion of plaque rupture is thought to be a thin cap fibroatheroma (TCFA) or "vulnerable plaque". TCFA is characterised by a necrotic core with an overlying thin fibrous cap (≤65 μm) that is infiltrated by macrophag...

OBJECTIVES Little data are available regarding coronary plaque composition and semi-quantitative scores in individuals with diabetes; the extent to which diabetes may affect the presence and extent of Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) needs more evaluation. Considering that this information may be of great value in formulating preventive interventions in this population, we compared these findings ...

We describe a patient suffering from late stent thrombosis in a paclitaxel-eluting stent which had an underexpanded ring due to the three-hundred-sixty-degree circumferential calcified plaque. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) revealed rotational atherectomy could successfully ablate both the metallic ring and the calcified ring. The ablated segment was scaffolded with a new paclitaxel-eluting st...