Uses of Cardiac CT Scanning Common uses of Cardiac CT Scanning are: Identify non-calcified (soft) and calcified plaques in coronary arteries of otherwise healthy people with risk factors for coronary artery disease and no symptoms Evaluate the cause of chest pain or shortness of breath including coronary artery disease, aortic aneurysm, valvular heart disease, pericarditis, pulmonary emboli and abnormalities of the lung Assess cardiac risk in patients undergoing non-cardiac surgery Evaluate patients with left bundle branch block Analyze coronary venous structures prior to biventricular pacemaker lead placement Analyze the pulmonary veins in candidates for atrial fibrillation ablation.

Unless you already suffer from the effects of cardiovascular disease, it is difficult for your physician to determine whether you suffer from the asymptomatic, early form of coronary heart disease that will place you at a higher risk for a heart attack and sudden cardiac death. If we can better identify patients who have heart disease before symptoms develop, we will be able to save lives with the earlier introduction of medical treatments and lifestyle modifications.

There are many reasons why early heart disease is so difficult to identify.

• A cardiac risk factor assessment provides important information for your physician that allows him/her to approximate your risk of suffering complications of coronary artery disease. Unfortunately, it will not define whether or not you as an individual have coronary artery disease.
• Familiar functional tests such as stress echocardiography and stress myocardial perfusion imaging cannot identify diseased coronary arteries until a more serious narrowing (>70%) has already developed and the disease is in its late phase.
• Imaging studies capable of visualizing diseased coronary arteries until now have been invasive and expensive thus not well suited for screening for early coronary disease detection.