A new AJR study out of Toronto General Hospital highlighted the largely-untapped potential of non-gated chest CT CAC scoring, and the significant impact it could have with widespread adoption.
Current guidelines recommend visual CAC evaluations with all non-gated non-contrast chest CTs. However, these guidelines aren’t consistently followed and they exclude contrast-enhanced chest CTs.
The researchers challenged these practices, performing visual CAC assessments on 260 patients’ non-gated chest CT exams (116 contrast-enhanced, 144 non-contrast) and comparing them to the same patients’ cardiac CT CAC scores (performed within 12-months) and ~6-year cardiac event outcomes.
As you might expect, visual contrast-enhanced and non-contrast chest CT CAC scoring:
- Detected CAC with high sensitivity (83% & 90%) and specificity (both 100%)
- Accurately predicted major cardiac events (Hazard ratios: 4.5 & 3.4)
- Had relatively benign false negatives (0 of 26 had cardiac events)
- Achieved high inter-observer agreement (κ=0.89 & 0.95)
The Takeaway
Considering that CAC scores were only noted in 37% of the patients’ original non-contrast chest CT reports and 23% of their contrast-enhanced chest CT reports, this study adds solid evidence in favor of more widespread CAC score reporting in non-gated CT exams.That might also prove to be good news for the folks working on opportunistic CAC AI solutions, noting that AI has (so far) seen the greatest adoption when it supports processes that most radiologists are actually doing.
