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The transluminal attenuation gradient in coronary CT angiography for the detection of hemodynamically significant disease: can all arteries be treated equally?

OBJECTIVE
Results of the use of the transluminal attenuation gradient (TAG) at coronary CT angiography (CCTA) to predict hemodynamically significant disease vary widely. This study tested whether diagnostic performance of TAG to predict fractional flow reserve (FFR) ≤ 0.8 is improved when applied separately to subsets of coronary arteries that carry similar physiological flow.


METHODS
28 patients with 64 × 0.5 mm CCTA and invasive FFR in ≥1 major coronary artery were retrospectively evaluated. Two readers assessed TAG in each artery. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under the curve (AUC) was used to assess the diagnostic performance of TAG to detect hemodynamically significant disease following a clinical use rule [negative: FFR > 0.8 or ≤ 25% diameter stenosis (DS) at invasive catheter angiography; positive: FFR ≤ 0.8 or ≥ 90% DS at invasive catheter angiography]. ROC AUC was compared for all arteries pooled together, vs separately for arteries carrying similar physiological flow (Group 1: all left anterior descending plus right-dominant left circumflex; Group 2: right-dominant RCA plus left/co-dominant left circumflex).


RESULTS
Of the 84 arteries, 30 had FFR measurements, 30 had ≤25% DS and 13 had ≥90% DS. 11 arteries with 26-89% DS and no FFR measurement were excluded. TAG interobserver reproducibility was excellent (Pearson r = 0.954, Bland-Altman bias: 0.224 Hounsfield unit cm-1). ROC AUC to detect hemodynamically significant disease was higher when considering arteries separately (Group 1 AUC = 0.841, p = 0.039; Group 2 AUC = 0.840, p = 0.188), than when pooling all arteries together (AUC = 0.661).


CONCLUSION
Incorporating information on the physiology of coronary flow via the particular vessel interrogated and coronary dominance may improve the accuracy of TAG, a simple measurement that can be quickly performed at the time of CCTA interpretation to detect hemodynamically significant stenosis in individual coronary arteries. Advances in knowledge: The interpretation of TAG may benefit by incorporating information regarding which coronary artery is being interrogated.