Background:

Coronary calcium scoring (CCS) is an underused prevention tool, possibly due to its high cost, which should not differ from a chest computed tomography (CT) scan. CCS can be assessed using conventional chest CT, generally through a visual or semiquantitative approach, and with a similar prognostic value compared to ECG-gated CCS.

Methods:

In this retrospective observational study, we included patients (n = 35) who underwent a low-dose non-gated chest CT (LDCT) and an ECG-gated CCS within the same hospitalization.

Results:

We identified a good agreement between techniques both in their qualitative and quantitative assessment, with a mean of 3.86 ± 0.7 segments with calcifications by ECG-gated compared to 3.79 ± 0.6 segments by LDCT (concordance correlation coefficient 0.98 (95% CI 0.95-0.99), and a 9.8% underestimation of the Agatston score.

Conclusions:

In this study, we showed that the CCS might be accurately assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively by LDCT studies.