This study indicates great potential for lowering doses for CT examinations of liver lesions using the new postprocessing filter. The software must be fully tested clinically to reliably assess the benefits of this filtration.
In 2008 a phantom study indicated that there is a potential for reducing the CT doses when using a new postprocessing filter. The purpose of this study was to test this new postprocessing filter clinically for low‐dose chest CT examinations, to assess whether the diagnostic performance is the same or improved. A standardized clinical chest CT protocol was used on patients with colorectal cancer. Only mA settings changed between patients according to patient size. One standard and one low‐dose chest protocol were performed for all patients. The low‐dose images were postprocessed with a new software filter, which provides context‐controlled restoration of digital images by using adaptive filters. Three radiologists assessed randomly all the images independently. A total of 24 scan series were evaluated with respect to image quality according to quality criteria from the European guidelines for chest CT using a five‐point scale; 576 details were assessed. Overall mean score is the average score for all details rated for all three readers for all full‐dose series, low‐dose series and low‐dose enhanced series, respectively. The statistical methods used for comparison were paired sampled t‐test and intraclass correlation coefficient. The postprocessing filter improved the diagnostic performance compared to the unenhanced low‐dose images. Mean score for full‐dose, low‐dose and low‐dose enhanced series were 3.8, 3.0 and 3.3, respectively. For all patients the full‐dose series gave higher scores than the low‐dose series. Intraclass correlation coefficients were 0.2, 0.1 and 0.3 for the full‐dose, low‐dose and low‐dose enhanced series, respectively. There is a potential for improving diagnostic performance of low‐dose CT chest examinations using this new postprocessing filter.PACS number: 87.57.C‐, 87.57.Q‐
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