Article Text
Abstract
Aortic valve replacement is the second most common cardiothoracic procedure in the UK. With an ageing population, there are an increasing number of patients with prosthetic valves that require follow-up. Imaging of prosthetic valves is challenging with conventional echocardiographic techniques making early detection of valve dysfunction or complications difficult. CT has recently emerged as a complementary approach offering excellent spatial resolution and the ability to identify a range of aortic valve replacement complications including structural valve dysfunction, thrombus development, pannus formation and prosthetic valve infective endocarditis. This review discusses each and how CT might be incorporated into a multimodal cardiovascular imaging pathway for the assessment of aortic valve replacements and in guiding clinical management.
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Funding British Heart Foundation (grant number FS/13/77/30488).
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement No additional data are available.