Ultra-Low Radiation Dose Renal CT Examinations

These efforts include the development of customized protocols that take into account the patient’s age, body mass and clinical indication. This allows for lower dose scan parameters and targeted scanning to cover only the region of interest and thereby limit oversampling. In addition, new iterative image reconstruction techniques can improve image quality on low dose, higher noise CT scans. As a result of these initiatives, radiation dose at Mass General Imaging has dropped dramatically. In the past year, the median radiation dose for an abdominal/pelvic CT examination has been decreased to approximately 5.4 mSv (Table 2). Even lower radiation doses may be achieved for some CT examinations, such as that for renal stones.