Dose reduction with adaptive bolus chasing computed tomography angiography.

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%.