Original investigationVolumetric Measurement Pulmonary Ground-Glass Opacity Nodules with Multi-detector CT: Effect of Various Tube Current on Measurement Accuracy—A Chest CT Phantom Study
Section snippets
Phantom
A chest phantom was used to replicate a 110-mm-thick transverse section of a human thorax. This phantom uses an acrylic container constructed to simulate a outline of chest. The thoracic cavity was filled with ground cork to simulate the lung parenchyma (13) (Fig 1); the mean CT attenuation of the cork was −910.56 ± 45.06 Hounsfield units (HU). The mediastinum and chest wall were simulated by gelatin (chemically pure; Sinopharm Chemical Reagent Co Ltd, Shanghai, China); the mean CT attenuation
Results
Segmentation and calculation were successful for all nodules (Fig 3). The reference-standard volumes in the nodules ranged from 589 to 897 mm3. The mean CT attenuation of nodules ranged from −633.22 ± 51.12 to −147.36 ± 28.62 HU.
The APEs of GGO nodules on volumetric measurement ranged from 0.14% to 22.67%. Table 1 shows the mean APE and the mean RPE of GGO nodules on volumetric measurement obtained with different tube currents; there was no statistically significant difference in the mean APEs.
Discussion
Recent advances in imaging technology enable the precise three-dimensional volumetric measurement of pulmonary nodules. In patients with solid nodules, volumetric measurements are said to be more accurate than the use of traditional one-dimensional or two-dimensional measurement methods 11, 12, 14, 17. For volumetric analysis of GGO nodules to be useful, the volume measurement software must be both accurate and reproducible.
The volumetric software used in this study showed good overall
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Volumetric measurement of artificial pure ground-glass nodules at low-dose CT: Comparisons between hybrid iterative reconstruction and filtered back projection
2015, European Journal of RadiologyCitation Excerpt :Regarding the volumetric measurement of solid nodules, previous studies have reported that the volume measurement was not affected by exposure dose reduction even at an ultra-low-dose level (120 kV, 5 mAs, FBP) or reduced tube voltage and tube current-time product (80 kV, 25 mAs, both FBP and IR) [7,16]. In addition, studies on volumetry focusing on pure GGNs without IR showed that there were no significant differences in diagnostic accuracy among various dose levels [17,18]. Moreover, recent investigations have reported that iterative reconstruction did not have an adverse impact on the volume measurement of pulmonary nodules [7–11].
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