What’s New in Cardiovascular Imaging?

It has been clear for a long time that cardiovascular imaging is a field in which quantitative analysis of the corresponding images is a must for clinical research studies. One such example is the quantitative coronary arteriography for the accurate assessment of vessel morphology and their changes over time in interventional cardiology. Particularly with the increasing use of three-dimensional (3D) data as well as 4D (3D plus time), it has been clear that the amount of information is so large that the conventional visual interpretation is not suitable anymore, and otherwise would result in unacceptably high inter- and intra-observer variabilities and under-utilization of the data. Fortunately, (semi)-automated analysis techniques, preferably with automated edge detection approaches, begin to appear, thereby providing a wealth of information with small systematic and random errors. This text should assist the cardiologist, the radiologist, the nuclear medicine physician, the image processing specialist, the physicist, the basic scientist, and the fellow training for those specialties, in understanding the most recent achievements in cardiovascular imaging techniques and their impact on cardiovascular medicine. This text consists of a total of 32 chapters subdivided into seven Parts.