Journals Information
International Journal of Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease(CEASE PUBLICATION) Vol. 2(2), pp. 11 - 17
DOI: 10.13189/ijccd.2014.020201
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Correlation between Measured and Visual Scoring of Coronary Artery Calcification
Jubal R. Watts Jr. 1,*, Daniel J. Dauer 1, Naomi S. Fineberg 2, Matthew Budoff 3, Hrudaya Nath 1
1 Department of Cardiopulmonary Radiology, University of Alabama Hospitals. JT N370, 619 19th Street South Birmingham, AL 35249-6830, United States
2 Department of Biostatistics, UAB School of Public Health.RPHB 343B, 1530 3rd Avenue South Birmingham, AL 35294-0022, United States
3 Department of Cardiology, Harbor-UCLA LA BioMed CT Reading Center. 1000 West Carson Street, Box 405, Torrance, CA 90509, United States
ABSTRACT
Coronary artery calcification (CAC) is a well-known marker of subclinical coronary atherosclerosis, which is always detectable in non ECG-gated routine chest CT examinations, and its visual estimation is correlated to clinical outcomes. Agatston scoring is not routinely performed on these examinations. We sought to validate a visual scoring scheme we derived against ECG-gated CT鈥檚 and compare our system with another previously published visual scoring scheme in a different cohort of lung cancer screening participants. 50 COPDGene participants received, regular dose full inspiration (non-gated high mA), and low dose expiration CT (non-gated low mA) and ECG-gated CT鈥檚 at the same time. CAC was visually scored by 3 readers using our total visual scoring (TVS) method and compared to the Agatston score. The second portion of the study involved visual and Agatston scoring of a larger sample of 198 lung cancer screening patients, comparing visual scoring described by Shemesh et. al. and our TVS method. For the COPDGene participants, scores were highly correlated among readers (all ICC鈮�0.92), between the ECG-gated CT, non-gated high mA CT, and the non-gated low dose CT (all p<0.001), and with the Agatston score (all ICC鈮�0.90). For the cancer screening cohort there was very good agreement of our system and Shemesh scores. Correlations between reader scores, our system, Shemesh scores, and Agatston scores were also very good, ranging from 0.81-0.96. We derived cutoff values corresponding to Agatston risk quartiles for our system and Shemesh. There was excellent correlation of visual scoring with Agatston scoring on ECG-gated and non-gated CT. In lung cancer screening CT鈥檚 both ours and Shemesh visual scoring correlated well with Agatston scores and with each other. Visual scoring may predict clinically significant CAC in major Agatston categories.
KEYWORDS
Visual Calcium Scoring, Agatston Scores, Coronary Calcium, NLST, COPDGene
Cite This Paper in IEEE or APA Citation Styles
(a). IEEE Format:
[1] Jubal R. Watts Jr. , Daniel J. Dauer , Naomi S. Fineberg , Matthew Budoff , Hrudaya Nath , "Correlation between Measured and Visual Scoring of Coronary Artery Calcification," International Journal of Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease(CEASE PUBLICATION), Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 11 - 17, 2014. DOI: 10.13189/ijccd.2014.020201.
(b). APA Format:
Jubal R. Watts Jr. , Daniel J. Dauer , Naomi S. Fineberg , Matthew Budoff , Hrudaya Nath (2014). Correlation between Measured and Visual Scoring of Coronary Artery Calcification. International Journal of Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease(CEASE PUBLICATION), 2(2), 11 - 17. DOI: 10.13189/ijccd.2014.020201.