الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Congenital heart disease is one of the most common types of birth defects. It can occurs in heart chambers, valves or blood vessels. A baby may be born with only one or with several defects. Serious heart defects are usually apparent soon after birth. However, less serious heart defects may not be noticed until later childhood or even adulthood. Many of these defects need to be followed carefully.
Although CT has been used in patients with congenital heart disease, its applicability has been limited by the low temporal resolution of conventional CT. Recently, the development of multi-detector spiral CT with subsecond gantry rotation time has been found to enhance the clinical applicability of cardiac CT in such field. Multiplanar and three-dimensional (3D) images reformatted from multi-slice spiral CT data can demonstrate normal and pathologic cardiovascular structures in patients with congenital heart disease, even in young children.
The short acquisition time of multislice CT enabling imaging of the whole heart in about 10 to 15 seconds in addition to ECG gating of acquisition can be utilized to non-invasively assess the direction of blood shunting in case of congenital intracardiac shunting.
The number of adult patients with corrected congenital heart disease has been increasing, owing to improvements in surgical techniques, other interventions, and perioperative care. Multislice CT with its high spatial resolution can delineate the complex anatomical details in such patients.
The radiologist must be familiar with the complex anatomy, morphology, and terminology of congenital heart disease, as well as with the interventional procedures used to correct congenital abnormalities. Thus, the use of CT is recommended in care centers with a well trained congenital heart disease team. Nonfamiliarity with the complexity of congenital heart diseases might lead to misinterpretation and mismanagement.
MDCT is an important non invasive imaging modality for assessment of CHD in both pediatric and adult patients. It provides valuable informations with high accuracy and specifity for anatomic details of congenital heart disease for the referring cardiologist. The technologic advances of MDCT have produced diagnostic images with increased speed and multiple reconstructed images such as multiplanar reformat (MPR), maximum intensity projection (MIP) and volume rendering technique (VRT). So, MDCT has become a routine examination in pre and post surgical and interventional evaluation.