Usefulness of Multidetector-row Computed Tomography (MD-CT) for Diagnosis and Evaluation of Cardiovascular Anomalies in Infants

Objective: We examined the effectiveness of MD-CT in the diagnosis and evaluation of cardiovascular anomalies in infants. Methods: MD-CT was performed 34 times on 21 patients with cardiovascular anomalies. We performed three evaluations: 1) The assessment of the specificity of MD-CT in detecting the morphological features of cardiovascular anomalies. 2) The diameters of aortae with CoA, and the diameters of pulmonary artery, measured by using MD-CT were compared with those by angiography. 3) The amount of exposure to radiation was measured Results: 1) MD-CT can detect CoA, pulmonary arteriovenous anomalies among extracardiac anomalies in all the patients. The diagnostic accuracy for intracardiac anomalies was poor as only six of the 15 anomalies could be accurately diagnosed. 2) The diameters of aortae and pulmonary artery obtained using MD-CT showed a good correlation with those obtained using arteriography (r = 0.97, 0.95). 3) The average dose-length product was 269.2 mGy・cm. And the average effective dose was 5.1 mSv. Conclusion: MD-CT is not suitable for the evaluation of intracardiac anomalies, but is extremely effective in the evaluation of extracardiac major vascular anomalies. On the basis of the amount of information and noninvasive nature, MD-CT should be used first before angiograph