WSC 2026 | Incidental non-cardiac findings on cardiac CT in acute ischemic stroke: the AIS of HEARTS study

So when we start to implement cardiac CT more globally and we perform it more often, the chances of detecting incidental findings increase as well. So in the AIS of HEARTS study, we included almost 3800 patients with ischemic stroke, and we detected incidental findings in 30% of patients with ischemic stroke. And the incidental findings that we found were most likely pulmonary abnormalities, but also in the liver, in the kidneys, etc. You can also find a lot of other incidental findings that fall within the scan window of the cardiac CT. So unfortunately, we don’t have data yet on the clinical relevance, but we previously already published a paper on incidental findings in only the Amsterdam UMC cohort. And there we found that patients with an incidental finding, about 30% of those had a change in patient management. So thinking about additional diagnostic workup or follow-up or actual medical treatments. But what needs to be considered with incidental findings is the balance between the positive effects, so the clinically relevant incident findings, versus the negative effects, so higher healthcare costs, ancillary investigations, but also the psychological burden for patients if they know their incidental findings. And these are all things that need to be considered but our study reported yeah it gives an overview of the frequency of incidental findings that may be detected once you implement cardiac CT.

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