Computed tomography angiographic evaluation of vascular pathology in a Nigerian tertiary hospital

Abstract

Computed Tomography Angiography has progressively replaced the invasive conventional angiography, and has now become the preferred modality for the diagnosis and characterization of most cardiovascular abnormalities. Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) alone is mostly sufficient to adequately evaluate vascular lesions in various disease conditions. This study reports the institutional evaluation of various vascular lesions on a 64 64 slice Computed Tomography (CT) scanner over an eight-year duration. It evaluates the major clinical indications for angiography studies and spectrum of findings on CTA, any agreement between major clinical diagnosis and CTA findings over an eight-year period at a major referral tertiary hospital in South-West Nigeria was also determined in this hospital based retrospective study of patients with suspected vascular lesions throughout the body evaluated with CTA from January 2011 to December 2018. All CTA scans were performed using a 64-slice Multidetector Toshiba Aquilion Computed Tomography scanner. The demographics, clinical diagnosis, type of CT angiography, and result of the CT angiography procedure data were extracted and documented. The data was analysed using IBM SPSS version 23.0. A total of 305 patients were studied. Among the extra-cranial CTA studies, pulmonary thrombo-embolism (38/184) was the commonest reason for CTA. There was fair significant agreement between clinical diagnosis of PTE and CTA diagnosis of PTE, but weak agreement between Aneurysms/AVMs and corresponding findings on CTA. The commonest CTA examination was cranial angiographies followed by pulmonary CTAs. The Hospital incidence of aneurysms was 2.6 times that of AVMs in this study. Key words: Computed tomography, angiography, vascular lesion, aneurysms, arterio-venous malformation.