CT diagnostic imaging is a major contributor to ionizing radiation exposure in the United States. Unfortunately, a reduction in radiation dose often results in degraded image quality. Automatic Exposure Control (AEC) is the most commonly used method to balance image quality and dose in x-ray CT, generally by modifying the scan’s tube current modulation (TCM) parameters. To allow current AEC techniques to be better personalized to the patient size, organ dose, and clinical task, our team previously proposed Scout-Dose and Scout-IQA to prospectively estimate dose and noise from frontal and lateral scouts, scan range, and TCM map. In this study, we evaluate for the first time the performance of our scout-based organ dose and noise predictions in an optimization framework to prospectively determine real-time, personalized TCM maps from a patient’s acquired scouts and scan ranges.
Automatic exposure control based on tube current modulation (TCM) can effectively reduce dose while maintaining image quality. Conventional TCM uses total exposure from the tube and noise in the center of CT slices as surrogates of dose and image quality, respectively. In this abstract, we present an automated method to optimize TCM at the organ level, offering increased flexibility and aligning with the concept of organ-specific radiation risk assessment. We applied our method to a retrospective CT dataset and incorporated automatic organ segmentation, Monte Carlo simulation for dose calculation, and an empirical model for noise estimation. This method was fully automated and readily scalable to massive clinical data, allowing the generation of ground-truth data for any data-driven approach to prospective planning, including methods utilizing scout images.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.