Clinical diagnosis of cerebral amyloid angiopathy related hemorrhage in China: Simplified Edinburgh criteria and Boston criteria version 2.0

Background: Accurate diagnosis of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) in surviving patients is indispensable for making treatment decisions and conducting clinical trials. We aimed to evaluate the diagnostic value and clinical utility of the simplified Edinburgh computed tomography (CT) criteria for CAA-related hemorrhage in Chinese patients. Methods: We analyzed 212 patients with lobar hemorrhage who underwent brain CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) from a multicentre cohort. Using the Boston criteria version 2.0 (v2.0) as the gold standard, we assessed the application value of the simplified Edinburgh CT criteria, and investigated whether the Edinburgh CT criteria predict patient outcomes. Results: Patients with probable CAA accounted for 36.6% according to the Boston criteria v2.0. The Edinburgh CT criteria indicated an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.735 for the diagnosis of probable CAA, and it performed better when there was a high-risk threshold of CAA in the decision curve analysis. Patients with a high risk of CAA based on the Edinburgh CT criteria had poorer outcomes at 90-day after adjusting for confounding factors ( p = 0.034). Finger-like projections in the Edinburgh CT criteria were associated with lobar microbleeds, cortical superficial siderosis, and multispot white matter hyperintensity according to the Boston criteria. Conclusions: Taking the Boston criteria v2.0 as the gold standard, the Edinburgh CT criteria demonstrated good diagnostic value and predicted outcomes well at 90-day in Chinese patients with lobar hemorrhage. Further studies with larger sample sizes are required to confirm these findings.