Practical Aspects of Computed Tomography

Abstract

In the following sections, some important practical aspects of computed tomography (CT) will be discussed. Among others, these aspects concern scan planning, data processing, and representation – particularly gray value scaling. In particular, scan planning plays an important role in clinical applications of CT since the scans cannot arbitrarily be repeated due to the system-inherent radiation dose to which the patient will be exposed. Therefore, it is furthermore not only important to properly plan the scan, i.e., to prepare the image acquisition, but also to be informed about how the image data may be represented. That is, how to appropriately post-process the acquired data, in order to maximize the information that is available from the images by means of modern visualization techniques. Both aspects – planning and post-processing – will be discussed in this chapter. The different scan protocols for the corresponding radiological aspects will not be discussed here; they are described, for example, by Romans (1995). However, in the last section some examples of the medical application of modern CT systems are given.