“…However, the main challenge of CCTA lies in the assessment of heavily calcified plaques in the coronary arteries because extensive calcification produces blooming artifacts that result in high false positive rates, thus significantly reducing the specificity and positive predictive value (PPV) [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. To address this issue, different strategies have been proposed and these include uses of image post-processing algorithms, dual-energy CT, iterative reconstruction (IR), and so on for suppressing the blooming artifacts with improved specificity and PPV, to some extent [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. A recently developed vendor-specific deblooming algorithm has been shown to improve the diagnostic performance of CCTA, with specificity and PPV increased from 45.8% and 69.8% to 75% and 83.3%, respectively.…”