A new densitometric approach to the assessment of mean coronary flow

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES. The authors present an angiographic method to measure absolute coronary blood flow in patients. METHODS. The left or right coronary tree is three-dimensional (3D)-reconstructed from biplane coronary angiograms, This allows the determination of the intravascular volumes needed for flow measurement. The 3D distance traveled by the contrast medium during one cardiac cycle is determined by appropriately thresholding the ''concentration-distance'' curves computed on two pairs of images taken one cardiac cycle apart, RESULTS. The angiographic flow measurements were compared with nearly simultaneous flow determinations obtained with an intracoronary ultrasonic Doppler flow velocity measuring device, The mean relative difference between the Doppler and the 3D measurements was 11% and the two sets of flow values correlated well (r = 0.81). CONCLUSIONS. A method for the determination of mean coronary flow is presented, The procedure is simple and can be incorporated easily into clinical routine.