Computed Tomography Scan Optimization of Chest and Abdomen Protocols

This work aims to optimize the scanning parameters of Chest and Abdomen protocols in computed tomography, whilst maintaining imagequality and reducing the dose. Two phantoms have been used to evaluate the dose and image quality on a 16-slice HITACHI CT system by establishing the optimization threshold for each protocol. The proposed Thoracic protocol has shown a reduction in Computed Tomography Dose Index (CTDIvol) and Contrast-Noise Ratio (CNR), and the spatial resolution has remained stable with a slight increase in noise. For the optimized Abdominal protocol, CTDIvol has reduced significantly, noise has increased at the two new proposed energies of 100 and 120 kV, and CNR has decreased. This research has shown that by optimizing Chest and Abdomen protocols, substantial dose reductions may be achieved without compromising image quality when using a multi-slice Scanner.