This article reviews recent discussion on potential cancer risks induced by pediatric CT; describes technical principles, dose reduction potential, common pitfalls, and areas of concern related to low tube voltage scans and iterative reconstruction techniques; and suggests an implementation strategy to optimize the pediatric CT protocol. Given the growing awareness of and concern for potential carcinogenic effects of exposure of children to ionizing radiation at CT, optimizing acquisition parameters is crucial to achieve diagnostically acceptable image quality at the lowest possible radiation dose. Among currently available dose reduction techniques, recent technical innovations have allowed the implementation of low tube voltage scans and iterative reconstruction (IR) techniques into daily clinical practice for pediatric CT. The benefits of lowering tube voltage include a considerable reduction in radiation dose and improved contrast on images, especially when an iodinated contrast medium is used. The increase in noise, which is attributed to decreased photon penetration, is a major drawback but is not as severe as that at adult CT because of the small body size of children. In addition, use of IR algorithms can suppress increased noise, yielding wider applicability for low tube voltage scans. However, a careful implementation strategy a...

Combined virtual noncontrast and iodine density images derived from portal venous phase dual-energy CT enabled accurate discrimination of adrenal adenomas from metastases. Background Dual-energy CT allows virtual noncontrast (VNC) attenuation and iodine density measurements from contrast material–enhanced examination, potentially enabling adrenal lesion characterizat...

Purpose: In this preliminary study, we aimed to evaluate the potential of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) series for generating radiology reports from concise imaging findings and compare its performance with radiologist-generated reports. Methods: This retrospective study involved 28 patients who underwent computed tomography (CT) scans and had a diagnosed disease with typical imaging findings. Radiology reports were generated using GPT-2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 based on the patient’s age, gender, disease site, and imaging findings. We calculated the top-1, top-5 accuracy, and mean average precision (MAP) of differential diagnoses for GPT-2, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and radiologists. Two board-certified radiologists evaluated the grammar and readability, image findings, impression, differential diagnosis, and overall quality of all reports using a 4-point scale. Results: Top-1 and Top-5 accuracies for the different diagnoses were highest for radiologists, followed by GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and GPT-2, in that order (Top-1: 1.00, 0.54, 0.54, and 0.21, respectively; Top-5: 1.00, 0.96, 0.89, and 0.54, respectively). There were no significant differences in qualitative scores about grammar and readability, image findings, and overall quality between radiologists and GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 (p > 0.05). However, qualitative scores of the GPT series in impression and differential diagnosis scores were significantly lower than those of radiologists (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Our preliminary study suggests that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have the possibility to generate radiology reports with high readability and reasonable image findings from very short keywords; however, concerns persist regarding the accuracy of impressions and differential diagnoses, thereby requiring verification by radiologists.

Dual-energy cardiac CT with a dual-layer spectral detector gives data about myocardial late iodine enhancement and extracellular volume quantification, comparable to the findings obtained by using ... Purpose To explore the usefulness of myocardial late iodine enhancement (LIE) and extracellular volume (ECV) quantification by using dual-energy cardiac CT. Materials and Methods In this single-cen...

By incorporating convolutional neural networks into the image reconstruction process, deep learning–based reconstruction reduces noise while preserving spatial resolution and preferable noise textu... Optimizing the CT acquisition parameters to obtain diagnostic image quality at the lowest possible radiation dose is crucial in the radiosensitive pediatric population. The image quality of low-dos...