Imaging

Using clinical event end-points in clinical trials requires large numbers of patients (> 10,000) and long periods of time (> 7 years), making it increasingly prohibitive to fully evaluate many experimental medical therapies. Recent advances in imaging techniques have revealed information about CAD that traditional angiography cannot, by allowing assessment of both the morphology of the vessels and the composition of the vessel walls¹⁰⁷.
Atherosclerotic changes to the arteries can be detected at cellular and even at molecular level in some cases, providing a unique opportunity to characterize the impact of potential antiathersclerotic therapies in vivo.

The following table summarises the relative benefits of the techniques discussed