Incidental Findings on Cardiac Imaging

摘要

Incidental findings are common in radiology practice, so it is not surprising that lesions are found incidentally during cardiac imagingexaminations. This phenomenon is well illustrated in cardiac SPECT, in which, for example, Shih et al. [1] reviewed 566 ~(99m)Tc-tetrofosmingatedcardiac SPECT examinations looking specifically for abdominal abnormalities. Those investigators found 234 abnormalities, including mostly enterogastric and gastroesophageal reflux and abnormal bone marrow uptake in vertebrae. McKenna et al. [2] reported extracardiacfindings in 107 (81%) of 132 elderly (mean age, 74 years) persons undergoing cardiac MRI; 63 (48%) of the patients had multiple findings. A total of 224 incidental findings were visualized, including at least one potentially significant lesion in 23 (17%) and one moderately significant finding in 43 (33%) of the subjects. Horton et al. [3] examined 1,326 screening electron-beam CT studies and found significant extracardiac pathologic findings in 7.8% of the studies. In a similar study of 1,812 electron-beam CT examinations, Hunold et al. [4] found that 34% of the patients had visible extracardiac abnormalities. Although those findings included a number of clinically insignificant abnormalities, 9.3% of 2,055 total extracoronary findings necessitated further diagnostic testing. Schragin et al. [5] found that 278 (20.5%) of 1,356 patients undergoing electron-beam CT had one or more noncardiac findings.