Keywords:
Cardiac, Cardiovascular system, Thorax, CT, Diagnostic procedure, Congenital, Dosimetric comparison
Authors:
F. Secchi1, P. M. Cannao'2, E. C. Resta2, M. Lombardi2, F. Sardanelli2; 1Milan/IT, 2San Donato Milanese/IT
Methods and Materials
We retrospectively evaluated 13 patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) of mean age 7±3 y.o.
(mean±deviation standard) underwent a cardiac CT.
We used a CT 64 slice (SOMATOM Definition; Siemens Healthcare) with injection of iodinated contrast medium (Iopamiro,
Bracco) with injection rate from 1.5 to 3 ml/s and amount of contrast from 10 to 60 ml according to patients characteristics.
CT scan was performed at 80 Kv and 100 Kv depends on patient weight.
To decrease the radiation dose basal scan was performed in only one patient.
Effective total radiation dose (mSv) calculated as DLP*k (coefficient conversion 0.019) was retrieve.
Two radiologists with different experience in cardiac CT blinded evaluated the diagnostic capability with a liker scale:
0: not diagnostic
1: partially diagnostic
2: fully diagnostic in respect to the main diagnostic query.
Image quality was rated both by grading images according to a subjective score as:
0 (poor quality)
1(acceptable)
2 (optimal quality)
Contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and signal to noise ratio (SNR) were measured.