The utility of multidetector computed tomography for evaluation of congenital heart disease.

BACKGROUND

Congenital heart diseases (CHD) are the leading cause of birth defect-related deaths. Multi detector computed tomography (MDCT) plays an important role for imaging CHD in addition to echocardiography and provides a comprehensive evaluation of complex heart malformations for the referring cardiologist. The aim of the study was to evaluate the utility of MDCT in the assessment of CHD.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A 102 patients with CHD were investigated after initial assessment by echocardiography. The information obtained by MDCT and findings of echocardiography were reviewed together by paediatric cardiologists and cardiac radiologists. Perioperative anatomic descriptions, wherever available(n = 34) formed the gold standard for the comparison.

RESULTS

The clinical consensus diagnosis defined 154 cardiovascular lesions in the patients. The results were classified in groups. We present the appearance of various congenital cardiac lesions seen in clinical practice.

CONCLUSIONS

MDCT provides important information about anatomic details of CHD for the referring cardiologist. The evaluation of different anatomic structures such as heart, great vessels, lungs and abdomen is possible in one acquisition with this technique.