Aloufi Abdulmunaim H, Aloufi Muhammed H, Aloufi AbduRahman M, Alsadi Turki, Alsadi Bander, Alrwethi Sami , Almahaliwi Khalid
Keywords: Computed tomography, dose reduction strategy, kVp, mAs, pitch, shielding.
Abstract: With the development of science and technology, the advent of computed tomography (CT) in 1970s was a milestone of medical imaging. Its use in the medical field has increased dramatically. In spite of great advances of CT in medical field, however, some attention is required to avoid imposing high risks associated with the ionizing radiation on patients during CT procedures, such as radiation induced cancer because greater radiation dose is used in CT in comparison to most of the radiological examinations. In addition of that early reports of MDCT indicated higher doses delivered to patients when comparing to traditional CT. However, comparable or reduced patient doses will be achieved if dose reduction strategies such as optimizing settings used in traditional CT are applied. The objective of this review is to evaluate the different CT radiation dose reduction strategies leading to identification of the most effective strategy suitable for clinical utilization. In this study 83 articles were collected in the literature search and four common dose reduction strategies including manipulations of kVp, mAs and pitch and shielding were identified. The results indicates that Shielding technique has the highest overall mean of 53% while the pitch manipulation has the lowest value (39%). However, all ANOVA p-values are greater than 0.05 and hence no statistically significant difference was noted among the mean performances of dose reduction techniques.
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