Comparison of body artery imaging between dual-energy CT angiography and traditional 3D CT angiography / 中国医学影像技术

ABSTRACT

Objective To evaluate the effect of automatic bone and plaque removal on image quality and grading of steno-occlusive lesions in patients undergoing dual energy CT angiography (DE-CTA) of body artery. Methods DE-CTA was performed in 23 patients with suspected body vascular disease. Separate datasets were calculated for each of the two tubes and used to generate automatically bone-subtracted images (ABS) as well as additional manual bone removes after plaque subtracted images (ABPS). In addition, a weighted average dataset from both dual energy acquisitions resembling routine 3D CT acquisition was used for automatic bone remove (ABR). Residual bone in the ABR dataset was removed manually (ABR-M). Operator time for bone removal was measured, while effectiveness of bone subtraction and the time needed of ABPS and ABR-M was assessed. Compared with MPR, ABR images and stenosis grading in plaque subtracted were assessed with two radiologists. Results The imaging quality of ABR was superior to that of ABS (P<0.05). The time needed of ABPS was (7.8±4.3) min, significantly lower than that of ABR-M (11.4 min±2.5 min, P<0.05). A total of 325 steno-occlusive lesions were assessed. The sensitivity, specificity of DE-CTA and traditional 3D CTA was 95.74%, 96.19% and 92.93%, 97.87%, respectively. Conclusion The imaging quality is good after automatic bone and plaque subtraction of DE-CTA. Automatic plaque subtraction for the first time provides a true CTA imaging which is easy to interpret and reduces the need for further post-processing. The diagnosis of vascular stenosis with DE-CTA is also accurate, and the time spent in post-processing is less than that of traditional 3D angiography.