Dear CT Insider,
Radiologists are moving from the "gee-whiz" stage to growing clinical experience in the use of advanced image reconstruction techniques that permit lower CT doses -- and the abdomen is looking like a very good place to start.
Radiologists from Hong Kong are getting more comfortable with an advanced iterative reconstruction technique that helps them tease more diagnostic power out of fewer photons, without loss of image quality.
Ultralow-dose CT is never perfect, of course -- crank the software up too high and you get odd-looking images that recall the late Impressionist period more than anything. But it does have some exciting potential applications. Get the rest of the story in our Insider Exclusive article, brought to our CT subscribers first, as always.
Nowhere is dose reduction more important than in kids, and the imaging team at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital is learning to live with image noise and benefiting from automatic exposure control (AEC) in their pediatric protocols. Features editor Wayne Forrest covers the study from the latest edition of the American Journal of Roentgenology.
AEC comes with its own caveats in kids, though, says a team from Greece. But one thing's for sure: not much dose is required to diagnose complex fractures.
Controlling pediatric radiation dose also means skipping CT entirely when it's not warranted. Associate editor Cynthia E. Keen highlights a drop in the number of pediatric CT scans in children's hospitals across the U.S., a trend that coincides with the launch of the highly regarded Image Gently campaign in 2008.
But just as the dose-reduction picture in the U.S. is probably less rosy outside of the highly controlled children's hospital environment, Europe has been something of a wild card in CT dose reduction, depending on the facility. Bottom line -- it's a management issue.
We've gone on too long again, but we're really just scratching the surface. Scroll down for stories on everything from CT for Crohn's disease assessment to liver perfusion imaging in Shanghai, China, where AuntMinnie.com was on hand for the International Congress of Radiology earlier this month. It's all here in your CT Digital Community.
