Affiliations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA | VT-WFU School of Biomedical Engineering &
Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg,
VA, USA | University of Iowa Hospital and Clinic, Iowa City, IA,
USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Er-Wei Bai, PhD, Departments of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. E-mail:
er-wei-bai@uiowa.edu
Abstract: Computed Tomography (CT) has become an effective diagnosis and
evaluating tool in clinical; however, its radiation exposure has drawn great
attention as more and more CT scans are performed every year. How to reduce the
radiation dose and meanwhile keep the resultant CT images diagnosable becomes
an important research topic. In this paper, we propose a dose reduction
approach along with the adaptive bolus chasing CT Angiography (CTA) techniques,
which are capable of tracking the contrast bolus peak over all the blood vessel
segments during the CTA scan. By modulating the tube current (and collimator
width) online, we can reduce the total radiation dose and maintain the contrast
to noise ratio (CNR) of the blood vessel. Numerical experiments on reference
DSA data sets show that by using the proposed dose reduction method, the
effective radiation dose can be saved about 39%.
Keywords: Radiation exposure, dose reduction, computed tomography, computed tomography angiography (CTA), contrast to noise ratio (CNR), adaptive bolus chasing
