Coronary angioplasty: a comparison of direct measurement and subjective assessment of angiographic narrowing.
Systematic differences in the assessment by two methods of the severity of coronary artery stenosis were evaluated in 38 patients having coronary angioplasty. The cine angiograms obtained before and after 45 angioplasty procedures and, in 23 of the patients, at the time of a further investigation several months later, were assessed by direct manual measurement of the dilated stenoses and by simple reading of the radiographs. Comparison was made of the most severe estimates of vessel narrowing obtained from any of the projections recorded. No significant difference was found between the estimates of the severity of narrowing in 45 vessels examined immediately before angioplasty and in 23 vessels studied again several months after an initially successful dilatation. However, in the 45 vessels examined immediately following angioplasty there was a tendency for the results of direct measurement of stenosis severity to be greater than those of subjective assessment. These results suggest that in patients having coronary angioplasty the manual measurement of stenosis severity from coronary angiograms is unlikely to add clinically useful information to that obtained from the reading of the radiographs by experienced and informed observers.
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Silverton
D001157:Arterial Occlusive Diseases / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D001699:Biometry; D017023:Coronary Angiography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male