Résumé
Abstract
Introduction Postmortem CT angiography is the method of
choice for the postmortem imaging investigations of the cardiovascular
(CV) system. However, autopsy still remains the
gold standard for CV measurement. Nevertheless, there are
not any studies on CV measurements on the multi-phase postmortem
angiography (MPMCTA) which includes comparisons
with autopsy. Therefore, the aim of this study is to compare
CV measurements between the native CT scan and the
three phases of the MPMCTA to find out which of these modalities
correlate the best with autopsy measurements.
Methods For this study, we selected retrospectively 50 postmortem
cases that underwent both MPMCTA and autopsy. A
comparison was carried out between the CV measurements
obtained with imaging (aorta; heart cavities and cardiac wall
thicknesses; maximum cardiac diameter and cardiothoracic
ratio) and at the autopsy (aorta; cardiac valves, ventricular
thicknesses, and weight).
Results Our results show that the dynamic phase displays an
advantage for the measurement of the aortas. However, the
MPMCTA is not accurate to measure the cardiac wall thicknesses.
The measurements of the heart cavities show no correlation
with the heart valves. The cardiothoracic ratio measured
by the MPMCTA shows no correlation with the heart
weight. Nevertheless, the maximum cardiac diameter exhibits
a correlation with the latter on the venous and dynamic phase.
Conclusions These results show that only few CV parameters
measured with imaging correlate with measurement obtained
at the autopsy. These results indicate that in order to better
estimate values obtained at the autopsy, we need to define
new reference values for the CV measurement on MPMCTA.