Publication Date
6-1-2014
Journal
The Texas Heart Journal
DOI
10.14503/THIJ-12-3061
PMID
24955043
Publication Date(s)
June 2014
Language
English
PMCID
PMC4060347
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
6-1-2014
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Post-Print
Published Open-Access
yes
Keywords
Atrial function, cardiac volume/physiology, coronary angiography/methods, heart atria/pathology/ultrasonography, image interpretation, computer-assisted/methods, imaging, three-dimensional, predictive value of tests, sensitivity and specificity, tomography, x-ray computed/methods/utilization
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Atrial volumetric measurement has proven clinical implications. Advances in cardiac imaging, notably the precision enabled by multidetector computed tomography (MDCT), herald the need for new criteria of what constitutes normal volumetric measurements. With use of 64-slice MDCT, we compared the atrial volumes in healthy individuals with those in individuals with coronary artery disease.
By means of manual segmentation, we measured biatrial volume in 686 participants who underwent retrospective electrocardiographic-gated MDCT angiographic evaluation. The study population included a control group of 203 persons with no cardiac abnormalities, and a study group of 483 patients with obstructive coronary artery disease. All variables were compared between men and women and between the groups.
We found a significant difference in left atrial end-systolic and end-diastolic volumes between men and women in the control group (P <0.05); however, right atrial volumes were similar. In comparison with the entire control group, the coronary artery disease group had significantly higher left atrial volume, significantly lower right atrial stroke volume, and significantly lower biatrial ejection fraction, except for left atrial ejection fraction in men. Right atrial volume and left atrial stroke volume were not significantly different. The results imply that a sex-specific reference value is necessary for left atrial volumetric evaluation, and that left atrial volume and biatrial ejection fraction (excluding left atrial ejection fraction in men) might be useful during diagnosis and prognosis in patients who have coronary artery disease.