الفهرس 
Acknowledgement
Technique of CTAngiographyOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Peripheral vascular disease is a common cause of morbidity all around the world. Epidemiological studies indicate that up to 5% of men and 2.5% of women 60 years of age or older have symptoms of intermittent claudication. The prevalance is at least three fold higher when sensitive non-invasive tests are used to make the diagnosis of arterial insufficiency in asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals.
Until as recently as ten years ago, catheter-directed conventional angiography and digital subtraction angiography were the only angiographic techniques that provided sufficient anatomical details to allow surgical planning for patients with peripheral vascular disease. However the complications and patient discomfort assocaited with these techniques have prompted the need of less invasive means of assessing the lower extermity arterial system. CT angiography has been shown to be accurate in the investigation of a number of diseases, but long gantery rotation periods and slow table speed limited the perrformance of CT angiography with single-detector scanners to relatively small anatomical areas. Multi-detector row CT scanners (MDCT) allow imaging over cranio-caudal lengths exceeding 1.5 meter. Imaging of the entire arterial supply of the lower extermities in a single helical asquisition is possible by MDCT.
The aim of this study to evluate the MDCT angiography as a recent non invasive technique for investigating peripheral arterial disease. This study included 60 patients (40 male & 20 female) with an age range of 5-84 years. All of these patients underwent MDCT angiography, only 10 patients underwent DSA.
The arterial tree of the lower limbs was didided into 23 arterial segments. Each segment was evaluated and given a grade of stenosis from 0 to 4 according to its appearance in the imaging modalities. There was more than 95% agreement between the findings of DSA and MDCT angiography. The sensitivity of MDCT angiography in this study was 98-100% when considering DSA as gold standard.
MDCT angiography has proved to be a less inavsive and a reliable method of investigating the lower limb arterial occlusive diseases with results comparable to DSA. MDCT angiography as a less inavsive imaging modality may be used for preoperative assessment of lower limb arterial disease. Conventional angiography may be spared for patients who are candidate for interventional procedures (e.g. angioplasty or stent application)
In conclusion, multidetector-row CT angiography has an excellent diagnostic accuracy in the assessment of lower limb PAOD, provided that the thinnest possible section width is used