Interactive Transcript
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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.