Recent advances in thoracic x-ray computed tomography for pulmonary imaging.

The present article reviews recent advances in pulmonary computed tomography (CT) imaging, focusing on the application of dual-energy CT and the use of iterative reconstruction. Dual-energy CT has proven to be useful in the characterization of pulmonary blood pool in the setting of pulmonary embolism, characterization of diffuse lung parenchymal diseases, evaluation of thoracic malignancies and in imaging of lung ventilation using inhaled xenon. The benefits of iterative reconstruction have been largely derived from reduction of image noise compared with filtered backprojection reconstructions which, in turn, enables the use of lower radiation dose CT acquisition protocols without sacrificing image quality. Potential clinical applications of iterative reconstruction include imaging for pulmonary nodules and high-resolution pulmonary CT.