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Minimal Calcified Plaque

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Okay, in this next case we're going to evaluate a patient

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who has mild calcified coronary artery

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disease the history for this patient abnormal EKG

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hypertension and hyperlipidemia,

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and they want to evaluate for potential coronary disease.

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So as we scroll down on the axial images

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We see the left meaningless patient looks for your disease.

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And then right away we get into the proximal LED and

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you see this big house by black. So I mentioned

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that it's important to window appropriately when

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you're assessing these lesions.

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Because you know when you have a more narrow window sometimes calcium

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can hide and be

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obscured by the bright contrast in

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the lumen.

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And the other thing is when you have a lot of calcium actually want

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to narrow even wider to make the

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calcium blooming minimize as much as possible. So,

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you know, if you're normally assessing on say a

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window something like this when you get a lot

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of calcium, you want to even go even wider with

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your window.

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To minimize the volume of that

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calcium as much as possible.

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Now let's just keep going through the LED to complete our

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assessment. It looks like this patient has a ramus see this

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big Branch here coming off of a trifurcation of the

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left Main.

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And it's a good size remix. So we definitely want to take a look at that for disease

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and I'll see any so far and then you can see which is

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often the case the circumflex beyond the ramus is not

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as big as the LED. So it's a smaller vessel.

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And heads down there gives off an tooth

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marginal and kind of Peters out.

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So if we finish our assessment of the LED heading

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back to this proximal calcified black, we're going to look at that again on

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the CPR images.

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So as we continue Downstream in the LED, you can

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see there's a small diagonal Branch here which comes off LED

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kind of takes a little bit but torch was course it

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continues this way. I'll give you all the branch

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that way.

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And then heads down towards the Apex.

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I really like using the mips for assessing the

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LED and for assessing the diagonal branches. So if

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you trigger the mips in these patients.

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You can see that a lot of times. They'll show you a really

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nice.

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visualization of the origins of the diagonals as

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they come off the LED

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In can help you see that idea as

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it heads down to the Apex.

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This patient also we can just point out as an aside. They've got a

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nice right dominant coronary circulation. You can see with the

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mips really nicely that the patient has.

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A PDA Branch right here as well as some postural

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ventricular branches.

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And this is a bit of a variant in normal coronary anatomy

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where you can actually see that the branch for the PDA.

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Comes off pretty early in the distal RCA and heads

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along the RV and then eventually ends up in the

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PDA territory, and that's just a normal variant.

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So far as I've looked through these corn areas. I saw only

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really that calcified plaque in the proximal ID.

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And so let's take a look on our CPR images.

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And assess this little closer.

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One thing to note when we're assessing stenosis. We

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always want to use the long axis images for stenosis assessment

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not short access images. And the

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reason for that is that our gold standard is cardiac catheterization and

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calf all the assessment is done

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via a long axis images. So we want to make sure it is be consistent

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with that approach to assessing stenosis. So

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I'm gonna zoom in on this lesion here and

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you can see

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Like I talked about in some earlier videos. We're looking

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at the amount of contrast that's moving past this lesion. You

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have a nice wide column of contrast passing

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this stenosis.

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So the degree of narrowing from this calcified plaque

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is very minimal.

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I would say just eyeballing it somewhere in the you know,

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20% range. Maybe at best.

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So again, the windowing really helps if you

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have a more narrow window, you notice how that actually

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makes the vessel calcification look a

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little bit bigger. So you certainly do want to make sure to narrow window

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nice and wide when your assistance calcified lesions.

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So mild calcite plaque in the led the distal

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vessel here.

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Looks good. I don't see any other disease.

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We've got a nice visualization of the diagonal branches which all look fine.

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There it is. There's that diagonal branch. That looks good.

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Overall just very minimal calcified black in this

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patient and I think you know certainly she would

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not need to have any further procedures.

Report

Faculty

Stefan Loy Zimmerman, MD

Associate Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science

Johns Hopkins Medicine Department of Radiology and Radiological Science

Tags

Vascular

Cardiac CT (SCCT Cat B1 Video Case)

Cardiac

CT

Acquired/Developmental