Forget catheters: the role of CTA of the coronaries

Kurzfassung: This lecture will provide an overview about the role of coronary CT angiografy (CCTA) in the evaluation of patients with atypical chest pain based on the state-of- the-art CT technology. Due to very high negative predictive value of CCTA to identify significant coronary stenosis, CCTA has a potential to reduce unnecessary catheterizations in patients with possible stable angina and acute coronary syndrome. In contrast, CCTA alone has moderate specificity which may increase downstream testing (i.e., lack of functional information). To offset the drawback, recent techniques such as noninvasive fractio…