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Clinical significance

• Intravascular ultrasound is widely available in cardiac catheterization laboratories, and is used as an adjunctive imaging modality during catheter treatment procedures (PTCA, atherectomy, stent placement).
• As a complementary imaging technique to angiography, IVUS has already overcome some of the shortcomings of coronary angiography in assessing the results of these new interventions.
• Atherosclerotic plaque is frequently complex and eccentric and the bulk or extent of disease in the vessel cannot be accurately determined from a limited number of angiographic projections.
• Angiography is insensitive to detection of early coronary artery disease. Moreover, angiography does not permit visualization of the vessel wall and plaque, and has substantial difficulty producing accurate results in the presence of diffuse coronary disease since the necessary definition of "normal" vessel segment is inaccurate.
• Other uses of IVUS include to investigate the progression and regression of minimally diseased vessels, the effects of lesion distribution (eccentricity), lesion composition (fibrous, cellular, calcific), and aging on arterial biomechanical properties, and the effects of these properties on the immediate and long-term results of catheter interventions.
• Despite the general availability of IVUS imaging, these interesting and valuable contributions of IVUS imaging are not now being pursued.
• The extensive labor needed to perform quantitative image analysis by hand precludes these studies.
• Methods that are being developed as part of this project can accurately and objectively quantify arterial structures in 3-D.

Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome. Please direct any correspondence to Milan Sonka by email: milan-sonka@uiowa.edu .

Last Modified: September 13, 1997

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