Original investigationCoronary Artery Stent Evaluation by Combining Iterative Reconstruction and High-resolution Kernel at Coronary CT Angiography
Section snippets
Materials and methods
This study was approved by our institutional review board; informed patient consent for retrospective analyses was waived.
Results
As shown in Figure 4, image noise on phantom images without cardiac motion (0 beats/min) obtained at 900 and 450 effective mAs with FBP and the CB kernel was 12.7 HU and 19.3 HU, respectively; it was 32.9 HU and 61.5 HU with the CD kernel. This shows that image noise increased as the effective current-time product decreased. With iDose level 4, the image noise on images obtained at 450 effective mAs was 14.3 HU and 34.6 HU with the CB and the CD kernel, respectively; these values were 9.2 HU
Discussion
CTCA is the most promising combination of temporal and spatial resolution. Use of the iDose algorithm with the high-resolution kernel at CTCA facilitates the reduction in image noise and improves visualization of the stent lumen because of a reduction in blooming artifacts. We compared images acquired with the FBP algorithm with CB and CD kernels and images obtained with the iDose algorithm with CB and CD kernels with respect to image noise, kurtosis, and the diameter of the stent lumen.
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