The Role of Cardiac Imaging in the Evaluation of Cardiac Involvement in Systemic and Neuromuscular Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

The contribution of imaging is of paramount important for diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatment follow-up of cardiovascular diseases.

It is well documented that many systemic and/or neurologic diseases may affect the cardiovascular system. Autoimmune rheumatic, endocrine, gastroenterologic diseases, and genetic musculoskeletal or endocrine diseases are between the commonest causes that may involve the cardiovascular system.

Recently, cardiology has presented a miraculous development in both early diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular involvement in systemic diseases. To achieve this target, the contribution of imaging is of paramount importance for early diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatment follow-up of cardiovascular diseases in this target group. The currently used diagnostic imaging tools include:

(a) Echocardiography, which is the most widely available modality, without radiation that offers valuable information about systolic and diastolic function of both ventricles in rest–stress. However, it is an operator and acoustic window depended modality;
(b) Nuclear techniques (SPECT-PET) that provide information about both myocardial function and perfusion. However, they use radioactive materials to acquire images;
(c) Cardiovascular computed tomography that gives information about biventricular function and coronary arteries anatomy non-invasively, but with the use of radiation;
(d) Cardiovascular magnetic resonance, which can perform biventricular function, flow evaluation, and tissue characterization and also great vessels/coronary arteries assessment without using radiation.

In this Special Issue of JCM, we will present the role of these noninvasive imaging modalities in the early diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatment follow-up of cardiovascular involvement in autoimmune and/or genetic systemic diseases.

Dr. Sophie I. Mavrogeni
Guest Editor

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