This year marks not only the 100th RSNA meeting, but also the 25th anniversary of spiral CT. At the 1989 RSNA show, Kalender presented the first clinical studies using spiral CT, breathing new life into a modality that had been pronounced dead in the late 1980s as MRI emerged.
"The state of the art of modern CT is impressive with respect to its performance," Kalender wrote in an email to AuntMinnie.com. "Continuing efforts to lower patient dose without reducing image quality is possibly the biggest advance. Sub-mSv CT has become a reality already for a number of applications such as cardiac and pediatric CT. Just reducing mAs is not a solution as the quality of diagnosis might be impaired."
Improvements in detector technology are an essential part of CT's advance, wrote Kalender, who is professor and chairman of the Institute of Medical Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and a consultant for Siemens Healthcare. Highly integrated electronics are reducing noise, and new detector materials are being implemented.
The use of directly converting detector materials such as cadmium telluride will be shown at this year's RSNA meeting, although they have not yet been released as products. Look for continuing higher resolution and higher dose-efficiency applications.
"CT of the breast might be the first example offering resolution as good as digital mammography at dose levels compatible with screening demands," Kalender wrote.
The session also features talks on high-performance conebeam CT of traumatic brain injury (SSA19-02); implementation of an open data format for CT projection data (SSA19-03); the first measurements of detector quantum efficiency on photon-counting, silicon-based spectral CT (SSA19-04); 3D conebeam CT of the foot and ankle (SSA19-05); grating-based x-ray phase contrast imaging (SSA19-06); 2D fluence field-modulated CT using attenuating filters (SSA19-07); and task-driven image acquisition for conebeam CT for interventional guidance (SSA19-08).
