Physiologic assessment of coronary artery disease by cardiac computed tomography

Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains the leading cause of death and morbidity worldwide. To date, diagnostic evaluation of patients with suspected CAD has relied upon the use of physiologic non-invasive testing by stress electrocardiography, echocardiography, myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) and magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed, the importance of physiologic evaluation of CAD has been highlighted by large-scale randomized trials that demonstrate the propitious benefit of an integrated anatomic-physiologic evaluation method by performing lesion-specific ischemia assessment by fractional flow reserve (FFR)-widely considered the "gold" standard for ischemia assessment-at the time of invasive angiography. Coronary CT angiography (CCTA) has emerged as an attractive non-invasive test for anatomic illustration of the coronary arteries and atherosclerotic plaque. In a series of prospective multicenter trials, CCTA has been proven as having high diagnostic performance for stenosis detection as compared to invasive angiography. Nevertheless, CCTA evaluation of obstructive stenoses is prone to overestimation of severity and further, detection of stenoses by CCTA does not reliably determine the hemodynamic significance of the visualized lesions. Recently, a series of technological innovations have advanced the possibility of CCTA to enable physiologic evaluation of CAD, thereby creating the potential of this test to provide an integrated anatomic-physiologic assessment of CAD. These advances include rest-stress MPI by CCTA as well as the use of computational fluid dynamics to non-invasively calculate FFR from a typically acquired CCTA. The purpose of this review is to summarize the most recent data addressing these 2 physiologic methods of CAD evaluation by CCTA.