Motivation

Abstract

Despite worldwide efforts to assess and control cardiovascular risk factors, cardiac diseases and in particular coronary artery disease (CAD) are still the leading causes of death in Europe and the USA (Deanfield 2001). In 1998 about one in five deaths in Europe and the United States was related to cardiac disease. Six hundred thousand CAD-related deaths were reported in Europe, nearly 500,000 in the USA. Over 12 million US citizens have a history of CAD; every year 1.1 million US and 300,000 German citizens suffer a coronary attack and more than 40% will die from these attacks. About every second victim even dies without being hospitalized. The gold-standard modality for diagnosis of CAD is invasive coronary angiography. More than 2.5 million such investigations are performed every year in Europe and the USA; more than 40% of them are not followed by subsequent interventional or surgical therapy and are conducted only for the purpose of ruling out CAD (Windecker 1999). These data show the high need for and importance of reliable non-invasive imaging for early and preventive diagnosis of CAD and other cardiac diseases.