Usefulness of electrocardiography-gated dual-source computed tomography for evaluating morphological features of the ventricles in children with complex congenital heart defects.

PURPOSE: Improved time resolution using dual-source computed tomography (DSCT) enabled adaptation of electrocardiography (ECG)-gated cardiac CT for children with a high heart rate. In this study, we evaluated the ability of ECG-gated DSCT (ECG-DSCT) to depict the morphological ventricular features in patients with congenital heart disease (CHD).

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Between August 2006 and March 2010, a total of 66 patients with CHD (aged 1 day to 9 years, median 11 months) were analyzed using ECG-DSCT. The type of anomaly was ventricular septal defect (VSD) in 32 (malaligned type in 20, perimembranous type in 7, supracristal type in 3, muscular type in 2), single ventricle (SV) in 11, and corrected transposition of the great arteries (cTGA) in 3. All patients underwent ECG-DSCT and ultrasonography (US). We evaluated the accuracy of diagnosing the type of VSD. For the cases with SV and cTGA, we evaluated the ability to depict anatomical ventricular features.

RESULTS: In all 32 cases of VSD, DSCT could confirm the VSD defects, and the findings were identical to those obtained by US. Anatomical configurations of the SV and cTGA were correctly diagnosed, similar to that on US.

CONCLUSION: Our study suggests that ECG-DSCT can clearly depict the configuration of ventricles.