Development of noninvasive diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases and education of cardiac imaging technology

[SUMMARY] Since the introduction of electrocardiography-gating scan technology and multislice detectors in the field of computed tomography（CT）, significant improvements in the noninvasive diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, including coronary artery disease, have been achieved using CT in daily clinical practice. After the introduction of new-generation CT, we have been using cardiac CT not only in our daily clinical practice but also in several clinical studies. First, we focused on evaluating plaques of coronary arteries and reported the usefulness of CT in assessing plaque characteristics in patients with acute coronary syndrome. Next, we demonstrated the high diagnostic accuracy of significant coronary artery stenosis using new generation 320-slice CT even in patients with arrhythmia or tachycardia who were not appropriate candidates for cardiac CT before the introduction of the 320-slice CT. We also evaluated myocardial damage as late enhancement in left ventricular myocardium on CT and identified it as a marker of future cardiac events in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We reported higher diagnostic accuracy of myocardial damage, on the new-generation 320-slice CT with new iterative reconstruction techniques in patients with non-ischemic cardiomyopathy. Further, we helped medical and postgraduate students with their cardiac imaging-related research. We also helped them win several prizes at medical conferences and write papers for worldwide medical journals in English. Here, we would like to introduce our contribution to the development of noninvasive diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases and to the cardiac imaging-related educational achievement for medical and postgraduate students.