Keywords:
Emergency Imaging, Trauma, CT, Health policy and practice, Quality assurance, Retrospective, Not applicable, Performed at one institution
Authors:
A. Azam, A.-L. Chang, M. Narbone, D. Prezzi, D. Mak, D. Hodgson, A. Pascoal, I. Honey, E. Barton; London/UK
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2020/C-15145
Purpose
Trauma has been described as a global pandemic with a high incidence of associated disability and death1. For the evaluation of the severely injured trauma patients, a variety of total body scanning protocols exist. Factors such as image quality, scan duration and radiation dose are important considerations in the patient with polytrauma.
Recently split bolus contrast medium injection with a single CT acquisition has been frequently used in both military and civilian settings. This biphasic split bolus IV injection protocol reduces the number of passes through the body and several studies have shown that it optimises the arterial and venous enhancement of organs2.
In our institution the original protocol was to perform arterial phase chest imaging followed by portal venous imaging of the abdomen and pelvis. However following the advent of split bolus CT, this new protocol was introduced as standard into the emergency department. The purpose of this study is to evaluate our institutional experience of transition to split bolus scanning from our standard dual phase protocol by comparing organ enhancement, image quality, radiation dose and number of image sets.