Keywords:
Cardiovascular system, CT, Acceptance testing, Arteriosclerosis
Authors:
N. Matsuura1, W. Yamasaki2, K. Awai3; 1Hiroshima City/JP, 2Horoshma/JP, 3Hiroshima/JP
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2013/C-0892
Purpose
Coronary artery calcium scoring (CACS) is widely used to access the patients risk of coronary artery disease.
Althogh the radiation dose at CACS is relatively low compared to the coronary artery CT angiography,
efforts must be made to reduce it further.
Recently introduced iterative reconstruction (IR) technique can reduce the tube current and thus radiation dose at CT without sacrifising the image noise compared with filtered back projection (FBP).
Though strong IR level may affect image quality of cardiac CT imaging,
we hypothesized that CACS may not be influenced by the application of strong level IR.
The purpose of our study was to compare the accuracy of CACS using strong level IR and a low tube current with the accuracy obtained by using FBP and a conventional tube current.