Clinical Evaluation of Intravenous Digital Subtraction Angiography in Chest Diseases in the Elderly

Abstract

To evaluate the image quality, we performed intravenous digital subtraction angiography for various chest diseases in 62 elderly subjects.
In large vessel diseases in the chest, adequate imaging was possible in most cases, especially in the main, right and left pulmonary artery and the aorta.
However, second order (subsegmental) and more distal order branches were sometimes judged unsatisfactory because of poor image quality. Five cases were evaluated as inadequate because of motion, i. e. respiratory or cardiac movement.
The pulmonary circulating time was measured by the time density curve of the pulmonary artery and vein by digital subtraction angiography, and converse correlation between pulmonary circulating time and cardiac index was obtained. Thus it was possible to evaluate the pulmonary circulating dynamics.
As mentioned above, intravenous digital subtraction angiography was a useful and safe method for chest diseases, especially in evaluation of large vessels in the elderly.