Patient dose, image quality and body habitus descriptor surrogates for abdomo-pelvic CT : an updated comprehensive systematic literature review

Abstract

Purpose: Effective optimisation in abdomino-pelvic CT hinges on the use of relevant and accurate estimations of patient risk (surrogates being patient dose quantities), diagnostic accuracy (surrogates being image quality descriptors) and body habitus descriptors in order to tailor protocol optimisation to body size and morphology (and ideally clinical indication). The objective of the literature review was to provide an update of the definitions and different methods for measuring these three categories of descriptors, together with their respective strengths and limitations.