Dear CT Insider,
We've got hearts on our minds this week thanks to the just-concluded Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography (SCCT) meeting in Denver, which produced a trove of studies probing the state of the art in cardiac CT.
The meeting highlighted multiple modalities working together, new scan techniques, and, perhaps best of all, news that radiation dose keeps dropping as technology marches on, helping to expand the indications for which CT is the best choice in children.
Pediatric CT is becoming safer than ever with the use of submillisievert coronary CT angiography in several iterations, including high-pitch mode. For a Minnesota study that produced excellent images with one-fifth of a millisievert of radiation, click here.
For adults with complex presentations, researchers have found that hybrid coronary PET/CT angiography is helping cardiologists in Ohio get more information up front and avoid additional downstream testing. Get the details here.
The cardiac CT guidelines issued late last year open up several new indications that weren't clear in the 2006 version, enabling providers to make sure they're scanning the right patients. But is anyone following the new guidelines from referral right through ordering and scanning? Find out here.
Finally, the past couple of years have witnessed several comparison studies of dual-source coronary CT angiography versus 64-detector-row, but how does 320-detector-row CT stand up to 64? Find out in our CT Insider Exclusive, brought to you first.
Also, we invite you to scroll down through the links below for our first stories from the recently concluded International Society for Computed Tomography (ISCT) meeting, including bold advice from a leading medical physicist to forget about the radiation dose when deciding whether to scan a patient. It's all here in your CT Digital Community.
