Experimental Examination of Radiation Doses of Dual- And Single-Energy Computed Tomography in Chest and Upper Abdomen in a Phantom Study

Abstract

The aim of this phantom study is to examine radiation doses of dual- and single-energy computed tomography (DECT and SECT) in the chest and upper abdomen for three different multi-slice CT scanners. A total of 34 CT protocols were examined with the phantom N1 LUNGMAN. Four different CT examination types of different anatomic regions were performed both in single- and dual-energy technique: chest, aorta, pulmonary arteries for suspected pulmonary embolism and liver. Radiation doses were examined for the CT dose index CTDIvol and dose-length product (DLP). Radiation doses of DECT were significantly higher than doses for SECT. In terms of CTDIvol, radiation doses were 1.1–3.2 times higher, and in terms of DLP, these were 1.1–3.8 times higher for DECT compared with SECT. The third-generation dual-source CT applied the lowest dose in 7 of 15 different examination types of different anatomic regions.

Single- and Dual-Source CT Myelography: Comparison of Radiation Exposure and Establishment of Diagnostic Reference Levels

“…CTM in dual-source mode is often preferred, especially in patients with postoperative status and metal implants after osteosynthesis, because it allows better beam hardening artifact suppression [6,20,21]. In the literature, studies on the impact of the dual-source mode on radiation exposure of CT are divergent [22]: our results, like other studies [23][24][25], show a slight dose increase, although in principle a comparable radiation exposure can also be achieved [26,27]. Radiation exposure on the SOMATOM Force was slightly lower in dual-source mode for CTM compared with the study of Grams et al [6].…”

An Intra-Individual Comparison of Low-keV Photon-Counting CT versus Energy-Integrating-Detector CT Angiography of the Aorta

“…Moreover, DE-CT limits the applicable pitch factor, which increases radiation dose and susceptibility to motion artifacts even further [22]. Hence, high-pitch low-kV single-phase aortic imaging has become the standard for EID-CTA [10,11,15,16,23] and is used for comparison to PCD-CTA in the present investigation.…”

“…For this purpose, reconstructions with a low keV level close to the k edge of iodine were generated from multienergetic spectral data to maintain the luminal attenuation despite reduced contrast agent dosage. One major disadvantage of DE-CT, however, lies in the higher radiation exposure per scan compared to single-energy CT, especially for abdominal CTA [9][10][11], although a dose benefit is achievable in multiphase scans due to virtual non-contrast reconstructions. Further limiting DE-CT for aortic CTA, image noise is considerably increased at low keV levels, subsequently hampering diagnostic assessability [12,13].…”