Aims and objectives
Recently,
the radiology community has spent significant effort to optimize the radiation dose from CT to ensure patient safety while keeping the highest possible diagnostic information [1,2,3,4].
For this purpose,
radiation dose tracking software were introduced by several vendors in the last few years.
These software can collect and archive dose values from several CT scanners to maintain an appropriate database which makes it possible to compared and analyze the different scan protocols [5].
However,
vendor’s radiation tracking software is usually expensive and not all...
Methods and materials
Abdominal CT scans were performed on 655,
451 and 422 patients with GE LightSpeed VCT (CT1),
GE BrightSpeed S (CT2) and Siemens SOMATOM Definition AS (CT3),
respectively.
For each scanner the AEC at the abdominal protocol was slightly modified compared to the manufacturer default values based on the opinion of an experienced medical team including radiologist,
medical physicist and radiographer.
Circular ROIs with an area of 150 mm2 were manually drawn on unenhanced single,
5 mm slice thickness,
axial slices in Jivex Dicom Viewer to...
Results
The ROI noise indexes (SD and SD/mean) and EffDose were inversely changed across the scanners (Fig.1 and Fig.2).
However there were fewer differences to notice between the GE scanners,
the noise indexes were practically same and the median EffDose values were 27.8 and 28.8 mSv.
Fig.
3-5 show the detailed correlation plots between standard deviation and the effective dose values for each CT study and in the case of the three CT scanners.
The greater EffDose spread is characterized by CT3,
while the smaller is...
Conclusion
Dose tracking software and objective image quality analysis could help in harmonizing the image quality of CTs from different manufacturers.
This harmonization can greatly assist the radiologist teams in preparing CT report in multi CT-vendor environment.
Personal information
Lilla Egeresi
Radiographer,
PhD student
Div.
of Radiology,
Department of Medical Imaging,
Faculty of Medicine,
University of Debrecen,
Hungary
E-mail:
[email protected]
Ervin Balázs
Radiographer,
BSc
University of Debrecen,
Kenézy Gyula University Hospital,
Department of Diagnostic Radiology,
Hungary
Sokvári Cintia
Radiographer Student
Div.
of Nuclear Medicine,
Department of Medical Imaging,
Faculty of Medicine,
University of Debrecen,
Hungary
Zsolt Dankó
Physicist,
BSc
University of Debrecen,
Kenézy Gyula University Hospital,
Department of Diagnostic Radiology,Hungary
Péter Bágyi
Senior radiologist,
M.D.,
University of Debrecen,
Kenézy Gyula University Hospital,
Department of...
References
1.Julian L.
Wichmann,
Andrew D.
Hardie,
U.
Joseph Schoepf et al (2017)Single- and dual-energy CT of the abdomen: comparisonof radiation dose and image quality of 2nd and 3rd generationdual-source CT.European Radiology.
27:642–650.
2.Bharti Kataria,
Jonas Nilsson Althén,
Örjan Smedby et al (2018)Assessment of image quality in abdominal CT: potentialdose reduction with model-based iterative reconstruction.European Radiology.28:2464–2473.
3.Christopher P Favazza,
Xinhui Duan,
Yi Zhang et al (2015)A cross-platform survey of CT imagequality and dose from routine abdomen protocols and a method to systematicallystandardize image quality.
IOP Science.8381–8397....