Coronary Calcium Scoring With Multidetector-Row CT

Coronary heart disease is the leading cause of death, illness, and disability in populations worldwide. Strategies to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease include the early initiation of primary preventive measures including lifestyle changes and/or medical therapy in patients with subclinical disease. The reliable identification of presymptomatic patients, however, is problematic by conventional risk assessment based on traditional risk factors. Direct visualization and quantification of the coronary atherosclerotic plaque burden would be desirable to more precisely determine a patient’s coronary heart risk. In recent years, there has been an important increase of interest in the use of noninvasive measurement of coronary arterial calcification as a screening test for coronary atherosclerosis. Since coronary artery calcification is conceived as a manifestation of atherosclerosis in the arterial wall, the detection of coronary calcifications may serve as a marker for the presence of coronary artery disease. The most frequent application of coronary calcium scoring has thus become the assessment of an individual’s future risk for a myocardial event. This indication and the predictive value of coronary artery calcium measurement and its role in the assessment of myocardial event risk has always been a matter of debate. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.