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Review
. 2006 Sep;36 Suppl 2(Suppl 2):212-5.
doi: 10.1007/s00247-006-0212-4.

New technologies to reduce pediatric radiation doses

Philipp Bernhardt  1 , Markus Lendl, Frank Deinzer
Affiliations
Review

New technologies to reduce pediatric radiation doses

Philipp Bernhardt et al. Pediatr Radiol. 2006 Sep.

Abstract

X-ray dose reduction in pediatrics is particularly important because babies and children are very sensitive to radiation exposure. We present new developments to further decrease pediatric patient dose. With the help of an advanced exposure control, a constant image quality can be maintained for all patient sizes, leading to dose savings for babies and children of up to 30%. Because objects of interest are quite small and the speed of motion is high in pediatric patients, short pulse widths down to 4 ms are important to reduce motion blurring artifacts. Further, a new noise-reduction algorithm is presented that detects and processes signal and noise in different frequency bands, generating smooth images without contrast loss. Finally, we introduce a super-resolution technique: two or more medical images, which are shifted against each other in a subpixel region, are combined to resolve structures smaller than the size of a single pixel. Advanced exposure control, short exposure times, noise reduction and super-resolution provide improved image quality, which can also be invested to save radiation exposure. All in all, the tools presented here offer a large potential to minimize the deterministic and stochastic risks of radiation exposure.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Illustration of the use of a changed SID for the generation of scaled images for super-resolution applications
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Major processing blocks of the noise-reduction algorithm
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Original image (left) and filtered image (right)
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Results of the super-resolution approach on C-arm systems. The upper image is one of the 31 input images. The lower row shows a magnified cut-out of one of the original input images (left) and the resulting super-resolution image (right)
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Super-resolution on DSA sequences. The upper image is one of the 11 input images. The lower row shows a magnified cut-out of one of the original input image (left) and the resulting super-resolution image (right). Areas of special interest, where the super-resolution images give additional information, are marked by circles
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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