About the Cover
ON THE COVER A 78-year-old female presenting with chest pain on effort underwent multidetector row computed tomography (CT). The CT angiogram revealed the presence of low-density plaque with moderate stenosis in the mid-portion of right coronary artery. The Hounsfield unit of this plaque was <20, which thus suggested a soft coronary plaque (left). Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging was performed 1 day later, on a 1.5-T MR system (Achieva, Philips Medical Systems, Best, the Netherlands), using a commercial 5-element cardiac SENSE coil (Philips Medical Systems). The coronary plaque scan was a navigator-gated free-breathing and cardiac-triggered T1-weighted inversion-recovery and fat-suppressed 3-dimensional black-blood gradient-echo sequence. The parameters of the sequence were as follows: repetition time 4.7 ms; echo time 1.4 ms; flip angle 20°. The spatial resolution of the sequence was 0.59/1.34 × 0.59/1.34 × 0.8/1.6 mm. On CMR, this low-density plaque on CT was visualized as a high-intensity area (right). Images provided by Shoichi Koga, MD, Tomohiro Kawasaki, MD, Nobuhiko Koga, MD, from Koga Hospital 21 and Shin-Koga Hospital, Kurume, Fukuoka, Japan.
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Copyright © 2008 by the American College of Cardiology Foundation.
