The utility of the combination of the corrosion cast method and post mortem MSCT scans

• Advantages of post mortem corrosion cast method and post mortem coronary MSCT were compared.
• CT imaging technique provides correct measuring of pathological changes in coronary system.
• Our data add information for the clinicians about the outcome of coronary stent implantations.
• Our investigation affords higher accuracy in quality assessment for coronary interventions.
• Our method provides an improved postmortem detection of coronary pathomorphologic changes.

A careful post-mortem investigation is needed to determine the cause of death of patients bearing coronary stents and to describe complications of stent implantation. The main purpose of this study was to combine post mortem methods of CT angiography and corrosion cast preparation for the visualization of coronary stenoses, coronary stents, instent restenosis, and stent occlusion. Injection-corrosion method was combined with post-mortem MSCT angiography to characterize the pathomorphological changes after stent implantation in 6 male cadaver hearts. Multi-slice computed tomography was employed to visualize the coronary artery system. For image post processing, multiplanar reconstructions, maximal intensity projections and three dimensional reconstructions were used. This study was assessing the feasibility of post mortem MSCT for intracoronary stent evaluation. We described a method for characterization of the coronary side branch stenosis caused by stent implantation. Post mortem CT imaging proved to be a feasible and highly reproducible technique for the characterization of pathological changes in the coronary system.