Detection of significant coronary artery stenosis with cardiac dual-source computed tomography angiography in heart transplant recipients.

Present study evaluates clinical feasibility of cardiac dual-source computed tomography angiography (DSCTA) to detect significant coronary stenosis because of chronic allograft vasculopathy (CAV) after heart transplantation (HTX). An overall of 51 consecutive heart transplant recipients (43 men, 8 women, mean age: 52.3 ± 13.6 years) underwent DSCTA 1 ± 2 days before annual routine invasive coronary angiography (ICA). Three patients were excluded from further analysis. Total 714/717 (99.6%) segments in remaining 48 patients were depicted in diagnostic image quality by DSCTA with three vessel segments in two patients being additionally excluded because of motion artefacts. On a segment-based analysis, sensitivity, specificity, and diagnostic accuracy (DA) for detection of significant stenosis were calculated as 100%, 98.9% and 98.9% respectively. On a patient-based evaluation, sensitivity, specificity and DA were 100%, 86.0% and 93.0% respectively for remaining 46 patients. Negative predictive value (NPV) was 100%. DSCTA enables diagnosis and especially the exclusion of significant coronary artery stenosis in patients after HTX with a high NPV. The low rate of excluded vessel segments compared with former studies indicates improvement in image acquisition and robustness of latest scanner technology and thus may make subsequent annual invasive coronary angiography unnecessary.
(© 2012 The Authors. Transplant International © 2012 European Society for Organ Transplantation.)