Assessment of the degree of coronary stenosis based on forensic pathological autopsy

Aims: The purpose of this project was to determine the percentage of the lumen area to the whole vessel area of normal coronary and stenotic coronary in humans at postmortem, to compare the difference between the value of measurement to coronary samples and slices, and finally to provide a reference for assessing the coronary stenosis severity. Methods and Results: Image Analyze software was used to measure the circumference of 82 human normal coronary artery samples, and then the percentage of the lumen area to the whole vessel area was calculated. Total 134 human coronary artery samples and slices were imaged using camera and microscope. The lumen area sizes were measured using Motic Imanges Advanced 3.2 software, yield R _S1 and R _S2. The percentage of the lumen area to the whole vessel area of normal coronary artery is 52.1%±3.3%. There were obviously differences between R _S1 and R _S2. Conclusions: The percentage of lumen area to the whole vessel area could be measured and calculated exactly using image analysis software, which can avoid the variability inherent in subjective estimates. The lumen area sizes of coronary slices measured with the image analyze software overestimated that of coronary samples by 7.9%±5.8 %.