THE SIZE-SPECIFIC DOSE ESTIMATE (SSDE) FOR TRUNCATED COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY IMAGES.

The purpose of this study is to investigate truncated axial computed tomography (CT) images in the clinical environment and to produce correction factors for abdomen, thoracic and head regions based on clinical data, in order to accurately predict the water-equivalent diameter (DW) and size-specific dose estimate (SSDE). We investigated axial images of 75 patients who underwent CT examinations. Truncated axial images were characterized by the truncation percentage (TP). Correction factors were calculated by using the value of DW for a certain TP (truncated image) divided by the value of DW for TP = 0% (the non-truncated image). Most of the thorax images acquired for this study were truncated images (86.2%), in the abdomen region about half of the images were truncated (48.1%), and in the head region only a small portion were truncated (9.1%). In the thorax region the value of TP for the truncated images varied up to 50%, in the abdomen region it varied up to 35%, and in the head region it was smaller than 10%. We have shown how to accurately estimate DW and SSDE by applying a correction factor to the truncated images. The correction factors increase exponentially with increasing TP. The corrected DW and SSDE for the truncated images were significant in the thoracic region, but were not significant in the abdomen and head regions.