Estimating lesion volume in low-dose chest CT: How low can we go?

Stefano Young; Michael F. McNitt-Gray

doi:10.1117/12.2043730

19 March 2014 Estimating lesion volume in low-dose chest CT: How low can we go?

Proceedings Volume 9033, Medical Imaging 2014: Physics of Medical Imaging; 903306 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2043730
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2014, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Purpose: To examine the potential for dose reduction in chest CT studies where lesion volume is the primary output (e.g. in therapy-monitoring applications). Methods: We added noise to the raw sinogram data from 15 chest exams with lung lesions to simulate a series of reduced-dose scans for each patient. We reconstructed the reduced-dose data on the clinical workstation and imported the resulting image series into our quantitative imaging database for lesion contouring. One reader contoured the lesions (one per patient) at the clinical reference dose (100%) and 8 simulated fractions of the clinical dose (50, 25, 15, 10, 7, 5, 4, and 3%). Dose fractions were hidden from the reader to reduce bias. We compared clinical and reduced-dose volumes in terms of bias error and variability (4x the standard deviation of the percent differences). Results: Averaging over all lesions, the bias error ranged from -0.6% to 10.6%. Variability ranged from 92% at 3% of clinical dose to 54% at 50% of clinical dose. Averaging over only the smaller lesions (<1cm equivalent diameter), bias error ranged from -9.2% to 14.1% and variability ranged from 125% at 3% dose to 33.9% at 50% dose. Conclusions: The reader’s variability decreased with dose, especially for smaller lesions. However, these preliminary results are limited by potential recall bias, a small patient cohort, and an overly-simplified task. Therapy monitoring often involves checking for new lesions, which may influence the reader’s clinical dose threshold for acceptable performance.

Citation Download Citation

Stefano Young and Michael F. McNitt-Gray "Estimating lesion volume in low-dose chest CT: How low can we go?", Proc. SPIE 9033, Medical Imaging 2014: Physics of Medical Imaging, 903306 (19 March 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2043730

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