Though it is common practice to examine patients for abdominal CT with the tube voltage of 120 kV, there is an expectation that the same image quality could be achievable by adopting lower tube voltages such as 100 kV with reduced patient dose, based on the fact that the iodine contrast is higher with lower X-ray energies. If this is really the case,the dose reduction will depend on patient size too. Thus the purpose of this work was to investigate patient size dependency of dose reduction efficiency with low-kV CT. Under the approval of institutional review board, we compared abdominal scan images taken with 120 kV and 100 kV, 150 patients each, in terms of dose-weighted contrast to noise ratio (CNRD),since it is the value of not dependent on the mAs value applied. As for dose parameter, we adopted size specific dose estimate (SSDE) instead of volume CT dose index (CTDIvol) which is being used widely, since CTDIvol does not represent patient size dependency of dose correctly. As a result in terms of CNRD of liver and spleen contrast, 100 kV outperformed 120 kV with statistical significance throughout all the patient sizes investigated. The difference was size dependent, being larger with smaller patient size.
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