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A KWIC and Dirty Look at Dose Savings and Perfusion Metrics in Simulated CT Neuro Perfusion Exams

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J Hoffman

J Hoffman*, T Martin , S Young , M McNitt-Gray , D Wang , UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA

Presentations

SU-E-I-36 (Sunday, July 12, 2015) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall


Purpose:
CT neuro perfusion scans are one of the highest dose exams. Methods to reduce dose include decreasing the number of projections acquired per gantry rotation, however conventional reconstruction of such scans leads to sampling artifacts. In this study we investigated a projection view-sharing reconstruction algorithm used in dynamic MRI – “K-space Weighted Image Contrast” (KWIC) – applied to simulated perfusion exams and evaluated dose savings and impacts on perfusion metrics.

Methods:
A FORBILD head phantom containing simulated time-varying objects was developed and a set of parallel-beam CT projection data was created. The simulated scans were 60 seconds long, 1152 projections per turn, with a rotation time of one second. No noise was simulated. 5mm, 10mm, and 50mm objects were modeled in the brain. A baseline, “full dose” simulation used all projections and reduced dose cases were simulated by down-sampling the number of projections per turn from 1152 to 576 (50% dose), 288 (25% dose), and 144 (12.5% dose). KWIC was further evaluated at 72 projections per rotation (6.25%). One image per second was reconstructed using filtered backprojection (FBP) and KWIC. KWIC reconstructions utilized view cores of 36, 72, 144, and 288 views and 16, 8, 4, and 2 subapertures respectively. From the reconstructed images, time-to-peak (TTP), cerebral blood flow (CBF) and the FWHM of the perfusion curve were calculated and compared against reference values from the full-dose FBP data.

Results:
TTP, CBF, and the FWHM were unaffected by dose reduction (to 12.5%) and reconstruction method, however image quality was improved when using KWIC.

Conclusion:
This pilot study suggests that KWIC preserves image quality and perfusion metrics when under-sampling projections and that the unique contrast weighting of KWIC could provided substantial dose-savings for perfusion CT scans. Evaluation of KWIC in clinical CT data will be performed in the near future.

Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: R01 EB014922, NCI Grant U01 CA181156 (Quantitative Imaging Network), and Tobacco Related Disease Research Project grant 22RT-0131.


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