[Value of coronary CT angiography in assessment of bifurcation lesions]

To evaluate the value of coronary CT angiography in assessment of bifurcation lesions.

The original image of 79 established and suspected coronary artery disease patients who underwent both coronary CT angiography and conventional artery angiography (CAG) sequentially were included in this analysis. Bifurcation lesions were assessed on primary and secondary vessels with diameter ≥ 2.0 mm, bifurcation lesions were graded according to Chen's classification. CAG was used as golden standard. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were calculated. Spearman's test and Kappa test were used to evaluate the correlation and classification identity of the two methods.

CAG evidenced 177 bifurcation lesions out of 445 bifurcation vessels and coronary CT detected 168 bifurcation lesions out of 404 bifurcation vessels with satisfactory imaging quality and 390 bifurcation vessels could be analyzed by both CAG and coronary CT. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of coronary CT angiography were 94.2%, 94.6%, 90.7%, 96.1%, respectively. The results for the lesions at LM-LAD/LCX + LAD/Mid, LAD/Diag, RCA/PDA were more satisfactory and the sensitivity and specificity were as high as: 97.1% and 94.2%, 95.7% and 89.5%, 92.3% and 98.7%, respectively. There were significant correlations for evaluating the narrow degree of the opening of the bifurcation branch with these two methods (r = 0.799 58, P < 0.01) and for identifying I, II, III type bifurcation lesions (Kappa coefficient = 0.7959, P < 0.01) as well as for identifying the subtype bifurcation lesions (Kappa coefficient = 0.6328, P < 0.01) using the two methods.

Coronary CT angiography is efficient in identifying the bifurcation lesions and offers a reasonable indication for bifurcation lesion classification.