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Contains fulltext : 244324.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) OBJECTIVES: To investigate whether adrenal volumetry provides better agreement with adrenal vein sampling (AVS) than conventional CT for subtyping PA. Furthermore, we evaluated whether the size of this contralateral adrenal was a prognostic factor for clinical outcome after unilateral adrenalectomy. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed volumes of both adrenal glands of the 180 CT-scans (88/180 with unilateral and 92/180 with bilateral disease) of the patients with PA included in the SPARTACUS trial of which 85 also had undergone an AVS. In addition, we examined CT-scans of 20 healthy individuals to compare adrenal volumes with published normal values. RESULTS: Adrenal volume was higher for the left than the right adrenal (mean and SD: 6.49 ± 2.77 ml versus 5.25 ± 1.87 ml for the right adrenal; p

Item does not contain fulltext INTRODUCTION: In a deep inferior epigastric perforator (DIEP) flap breast reconstruction, computed tomography angiography (CTA) is currently considered as the gold standard in preoperative imaging for this procedure. Unidirectional Doppler ultrasound (US) is frequently used; however, this method does not distinguish the main axial vessels from perforator arteries at the height of the fascia, it has a limited penetration depth, and it cannot assess the branching patterns of the deep inferior arteries. A new method and system were developed, which consisted of a video projector preoperatively displaying the location and intramuscular course of the artery perforators and subcutaneous branching on the patient's abdomen. METHOD: All patients (n = 9) underwent a standard protocol: a preoperative CTA was performed and the DIEPs were localized using a unidirectional Doppler probe. In addition, a three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the perforator locations based on CTA was projected on the abdomen of the patients. All projected perforator locations were assessed using a unidirectional Doppler probe. The intraoperative results were collected for comparison. RESULTS: A total of 88 locations were marked with the use of unidirectional Doppler and a total of 100 perforators were projected (p = 0.38). In 98 out of 100 projected perforator locations, a Doppler signal was audible. The intraoperative results demonstrate that 19 out of 34 transplanted perforators were correctly identified with unidirectional Doppler (56.9% +/- 31.4%), where the projection method properly revealed 29 locations (84.3% +/- 25.8%) (p = 0.030). CONCLUSION: The projection method is not only capable of providing more information and identifying more perforators used for transplantation than unidirectional Doppler probing but also more accurate in pointing out the corresponding perforator found intraoperatively.

Purpose: ECG-gated CTA allows visualization of the aneurysm and stentgraft during the different phases of the cardiac cycle, although with a lower SNR per cardiac phase than without ECG gating using the same dose. In our institution, abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is evaluated using non-ECG-gated CTA. Some common CT scanners cannot reconstruct a non-gated volume from ECG-gated acquired data. In order to obtain the same diagnostic image quality, we propose off-line temporal averaging of the ECG-gated data. This process, though straightforward, is fundamentally different from taking a non-gated scan, and its result will certainly differ as well. The purpose of this study is to quantitatively investigate how good off-line averaging approximates a non-gated scan. Method: Non-gated and ECG-gated CT scans have been performed on a phantom (Catphan 500). Afterwards the phases of the ECG-gated CTA data were averaged to create a third dataset. The three sets are compared with respect to noise prop-erties (NPS) and frequency response (MTF). To study motion artifacts identical scans were acquired on a programmable dynamic phantom. Results and Conclusions: The experiments show that the spatial frequency content is not affected by the averaging process. The minor differences observed for the noise properties and motion artifacts are in favor of the averaged data. Therefore the averaged ECG-gated phases can be used for diagnosis. This enables the use of ECG-gating for research on stentgrafts in AAA, without impairing clinical patient care.