Protocols

For routine pediatric abdomen PCCT, start with Quantum mode at 70 kV and low-keV VMI rather than defaulting to QuantumPlus. Based on their phantom work, the authors favor the lowest tube voltage as the ALARA-oriented starting point, and for their standard protocol they selected 70 kV Quantum mode with VMI 53 keV. Optimize…

PCCT reduced iodine load by 26.7% and CTDIvol by 24.4% compared to highly individualized EID-CT protocols, confirming real-world dose efficiency even against optimized reference standards. Diagnostic image quality (IQ) remained equivalent, with no significant differences in attenuation or SNR and only a minor, clinically…

In 30 patients with genotype-confirmed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, global PCCT-derived extracellular volume (ECV) closely matched cardiac MRI: 30.0 ± 4.8% vs 30.62 ± 4.2% (p = 0.59), with a small Bland–Altman bias of 0.6% and limits of agreement of −1.49% to 2.75%. Agreement was also strong regionally, with segmental…

In this retrospective cohort of 159 patients with subarachnoid haemorrhage, UHR PCCT substantially improved lenticulostriate artery (LSA) visualization compared with conventional EID-CTA. For branches arising >5 mm from the MCA origin, PCCT detection approached DSA—for example, 93% vs 85% for observer 1 in the left…

In 37 children with congenital heart disease matched to 37 EID-CT controls by water-equivalent diameter, non-ECG-gated high-pitch PCCT substantially reduced radiation exposure: CTDIvol 0.20 ± 0.12 vs 0.37 ± 0.17 mGy and DLP 4.06 ± 3.22 vs 7.21 ± 4.67 mGy·cm (p < 0.001 for both), corresponding to roughly 46% and 44%…

In this selected pilot cohort of 20 complex neurosurgical cases, UHR PCCT provided additional anatomical information beyond conventional MRI/CT, particularly for arterial anatomy (11/20, 55%), tumor vascular supply (7/20, 35%), venous anatomy (6/20, 30%), and skull-base/orbital/osseous involvement (8/20, 40%). The greatest…

This study combined physical phantom testing of 11 UHR reconstruction kernels (Hr60–Hr98) with clinical visual assessment in 12 patients / 24 temporal bones. Physically, increasing kernel sharpness improved spatial resolution but increased high-frequency noise: Hr96 achieved the highest measured resolution, whereas Hr60…

@Bálint Szilveszter, Borbála Vattay, Péter Csongor, @Milan Vecsey-Nagy Városmajor Heart and Vascular Centre, Cardiac CT Working Group, Budapest, Hungary September 29, 2026 History Why did the patient come for a CT exam? A 63-year-old female patient, presenting with typical chest pain, was referred for coronary imaging to…

Ferenc Imre Suhai, Barbara Sipos, Milán Vecsey-Nagy, Bálint Szilveszter Városmajor Heart and Vascular Centre, Cardiac CT Working Group, Budapest, Hungary September 29, 2026 History Why did the patient come for a CT exam? A 29-year-old male patient, with a history of hypertension and bronchial asthma, was referred to the…

In 71 post-TAVI PCCT examinations from 63 patients, time-resolved cardiac PCCT enabled calculation of prosthetic-valve hemodynamics from left-ventricular volumetry and direct valve-orifice planimetry. CT-derived mean and maximum transvalvular gradients correlated strongly with echocardiography (ρ = 0.85 for both), while…

In 12 patients after mechanical thrombectomy, 54 ASPECTS regions ultimately developed infarction; 40/54 (74.1%) showed hyperattenuation on PCCT iodine maps, but only 15/40 (37.5%) were visually hyperattenuating on conventional brain-window images. Thus, iodine accumulation was frequently measurable before becoming visually…

In 25 consecutive patients with Cushing disease undergoing transsphenoidal surgery, dynamic pituitary PCCT localized corticotroph adenomas substantially more accurately than preoperative MRI: 92% vs 56%, respectively (p = .01). PCCT identified a lesion in 24/25 patients, with only one misleading localization. The gain was…

In this feasibility study, an ultra-low-dose pediatric chest PCCT protocol was optimized to Sn100 kVp, 2 mAs, pitch 1.5, achieving a phantom effective dose of 14 µSv. In clinical use, the median total effective dose was 11.6 µSv, close to the 8.2 µSv median dose of a single chest radiograph. The protocol was applied in 24…

In 27 adults with suspected respiratory infection, an ultra-low-dose PCCT chest protocol achieved a mean effective dose of 0.11 ± 0.04 mSv, essentially matching the German reference dose for a two-view chest radiograph. Despite this very low exposure, PCCT provided substantially more diagnostic information than…

This early case series illustrates how UHR PCCT can improve structural heart imaging before and after TAVR, particularly through sharper depiction of the aortic valve, annulus, coronary arteries, prosthetic valve frames, and vascular access routes. UHR acquisition allows 0.2-mm sections, compared with 0.4 mm in the regular…

In 110 patients undergoing EVAR surveillance, including 41 endoleaks, the authors compared conventional triphasic PCCT (true noncontrast + arterial + venous) with a biphasic strategy in which virtual noniodine (VNI) images reconstructed from the venous phase replaced the true noncontrast acquisition. Endoleak detection was…

In 124 patients with CCTA and invasive coronary angiography (ICA) within 30 days, diagnostic performance of PCCT CCTA was similar with and without sublingual nitroglycerin. Per-patient sensitivity was 90.3% vs 90.9%, and NPV was 86.4% vs 88.9%, with no significant differences between groups. The non-nitroglycerin group was…