Cardiac computed tomography with late contrast enhancement: A review.

Cardiac computed tomography (CCT) has assumed an increasingly significant role in the evaluation of coronary artery disease (CAD) during the past few decades, whereas cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) remains the gold standard for myocardial tissue characterization. The discovery of late myocardial enhancement following intravenous contrast administration dates back to the 1970s with ex-vivo CT animal investigations; nevertheless, the clinical application of this phenomenon for cardiac tissue characterization became prevalent for CMR imaging far earlier than for CCT imaging. Recently the technical advances in CT scanners have made it possible to take advantage of late contrast enhancement (LCE) for tissue characterization in CCT exams. Moreover, the introduction of extracellular volume calculation (ECV) on cardiac CT images combined with the possibility of evaluating cardiac function in the same exam is making CCT imaging a multiparametric technique more and more similar to CMR. The aim of our review is to provide a comprehensive overview on the role of CCT with LCE in the evaluation of a wide range of cardiac conditions.

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© 2024 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Marco Gatti MD is a Guest editor for Heliyon Clinical Research.The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Dr. Marco Gatti is an Editor for Heliyon. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.