Technique reduces CT radiation

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Aug. 20 (UPI) -- A technique may help reduce the radiation doses of computed tomography, U.S. researchers said.

The study, published in the American Journal of Roentgenology, found the image enhancing technique called adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction may enable radiologists to reduce patient radiation resulting from CT by up to 65 percent.

The researchers compared CT scans using the newly adapted low-dose adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction method and the standard dose method without adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction performed both on a phantom and 12 patients.

"We found nearly identical image quality using the reduced dose CT method with adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction compared with the standard dose CT method without adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction," study lead author Dr. Amy Hara of the Mayo Clinic Arizona in Scottsdale said in a statement.

Hara said in future studies, it will be important to not only evaluate image quality, but to assess diagnostic accuracy.

"Adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction is new to CT but in our practice it has been very successful," Hara said.