AbstractAim: The aim of this study was to compare objective image quality data for patient pulmonary embolism between aconventional pulmonary CTA protocol with respect to a novel acquisition protocol performed with optimize radiationdose and less amount of iodinated contrast medium injected to the patients during PE scanning.Materials and Methods: Sixty- four patients with Pulmonary Embolism (PE) possibility, were examined using angio-CTprotocol. Patients were randomly assigned to two groups: A (16 women and 16 men, with age ranging from 19-89years) mean age, 62 years with standard deviation 16; range, 19-89 years) - injected contrast agent: 35-40 ml. B (16women and 16 men, with age ranging from 28-86 years) - injected contrast agent: 70-80 ml. Other scanning parameterswere kept constant. Pulmonary vessel enhancement and image noise were quantified; signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) andcontrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were calculated. Subjective vessel contrast was assessed by two radiologists in consensus.Result: A total of 14 cases of PE (22 %) were found in the evaluated of subjects (nine in group A, and five in group B).All PE cases were detected by the two readers. There was no significant difference in the size or location of the PEsbetween the two groups, the average image noise was 14 HU for group A and 19 HU for group B. The difference wasnot statistically significant (p = 0.09). Overall, the SNR and CNR were slightly higher on group B (24.4 and 22.5respectively) compared with group A (19.4 and 16.4 respectively), but those differences were not statisticallysignificant (p = 0.71 and p = 0.35, respectively).Conclusion and Discussion: Both groups that had been evaluated by pulmonary CTA protocol allow similar imagequality to be achieved as compared with each other's, with optimize care dose for both protocol and contrast volumewere reduced by 50 % in new protocol comparing to the conventional protocol.

Title

Polish Society of Medical Physics

Publisher

sciendo.com

Publisher Country

Poland

Indexing

Scopus

Impact Factor

0.79

Publication Type

Both (Printed and Online)

Volume

23

Year

2017

Pages

43-46