title: Diagnostic CT imaging of the heart and aorta in health and disease.
abstract: Despite recent remarkable developments in computed tomography (CT) for many organs in the human body, its clinical application concerning the cardiovascular system has been slow. In this study, we investigated clinical applications of CT for the cardiovascular system. We used conventional CT without ECG synchronization and ECG-synchronized CT. By the former, the size, the shape, and the arrangement of cardiovascular structures and the presence of pericardial effusion and calcifications were shown. for the latter, ECG gating method and data sorting method were used, and the cardiac border movement, the sequential changes of cross-sectional cardiac areas and the changing ratio were studied by both methods. The cardiac CT was found to be a useful noninvasive method for observation of anatomical features in various cardiovascular diseases and for the analysis of cardiac motion - especially, dyssynergia such as hypokinesis, akinesis and paradoxical movement in myocardial infarctions.
mesh_terms: D001011:Aorta / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D001013:Aorta, Thoracic / Q000002:abnormalities; D002318:Cardiovascular Diseases / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D002319:Cardiovascular System / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D004562:Electrocardiography; D006321:Heart / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans; D011651:Pulmonary Artery / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D011877:Radionuclide Imaging; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000379:methods*; D014188:Transposition of Great Vessels / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging