According to a study presented at the Annual meeting of the Radiology Society of North America
(RSNA), an innovative Computed Tomography (CT) Technology can reduce the amount of radiation received by the patient during the scanning procedure can be reduced to more than 90 percent compared to conventional scanners.
The study was presented by Dr. James Earls, a radiologist from Fairfax Radiological Consultants in suburban Washington, D.C. Dr. Earls is the author of the study and medical director of Cardiovascular CT and MRI at Fairfax Radiological Consultants.
The study was conducted at three centers: Fairfax Radiological Consultants in Fairfax, Virginia: Cornell University / New York Hospital in New York; and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada during a 9-month period, and consisted of 1,202 patients.
The new CT scanners use a new method known as adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction (ASIR). In addition to reduction in the radiation exposure, the scans also provides a clear image of the heart which helps to identify patients likely to get a heart attack. Also reduction in radiation exposure means reduction in cancer risk.
Fairfax Radiological Consultants has replaced the old technology scanners by the new one and became the only facility in the world with most number of low dose scanners.
The importance of the study lies in the fact that over-exposure to radiation from CT scans is a much discussed and debated topics in the healthcare field nowadays. CT scanners generates x-rays which are passed through the patient and picked up and processed by a computer to provide three dimensional images of the organ. The radiation received by a single whole body CT scan is about that received by 500 conventional x-rays.
While CT scans are reported to increase the cancer risk by about 0.05 percent, radiologists warn that overzealous doctors are ordering unnecessary CT scans leading to over diagnosis and unnecessary interventions as well as increased radiation risk. In this scenario, the attempt to develop a technology that reduces the radiation exposure during a CT scan is highly appreciable.
