CT Angiography: Post-processed Contrast Enhancement for Improved Detection of Pulmonary Embolism

Rationale and Objectives The study aimed to improve the detection of pulmonary embolism via an iodine contrastenhancement tool in patients who underwent suboptimal enhanced computed tomography angiography(CTA). Materials and Methods We evaluated the CT examinations of 41 patients who underwent CTA for evaluation of the pulmonary arterieswhich suffered from suboptimal contrast enhancement. The contrast enhancement of the reconstructed images was increased via a post-processing tool (vContrast). Image noiseand contrast-to- noise ratio(CNR) were assessed in eight different regions: main pulmonary artery, rightand left pulmonary arteries, rightand leftsegment arteries, muscle, subcutaneous fat, and bone. For subjective image assessment, three experienced radiologists evaluated the diagnostic quality. Results While employing the post-processing algorithm, the CNR for contrast-filled lumen and thrombus/muscle improves significantly by a factor of 1.7 (CNR without vContrast = 8.48 ± 6.79/CNR with vContrast = 14.46 ± 5.29) ( P  0.01). No strengthening of artifacts occurred, and the mean Hounsfield unit values of the muscle, subcutaneous fat, and the bone showed no significant changes. Subjective image analysis illustrated a significant improvement using post-processing for clinically relevant criteria such as diagnostic confidence. Conclusions vContrast makes CT angiograms with inadequate contrast applicable for diagnostic evaluation, offering an improved visualization of the pulmonary arteries. In addition, vContrast can help in the significant reduction of the iodine contrastmaterial.