(Sunday, 7/12/2020) [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]
Room: AAPM ePoster Library
Purpose: Development of a novel head pad for improved image quality in CT imaging.
Methods: For patient comfort there is a requirement for a pad to lie below the patient’s head during CT imaging. One critical consideration in head pad design is the ability for the technologist to visualize the ears in order to properly landmark the patient. Therefore, there is a strong desire to have a cutout of the head holder for the ears. Traditional designs for head pads have sharp transitions around the ear cutouts.
Sharp transitions around the ear cutouts can lead to image artifacts. Therefore, we propose and test a new design for CT head pads which includes chamfered edges of the ear cutout.
A simple metric for artifacts induced by the head pad is defined here as measured in the coronal plane where the artifact is observed to be the worst: Artifact Metric % (AM)= (|SD_near_ear_cutout-SD_center|)/(SD_center)*100, where SD is standard deviation.
A traditional head pad was scanned along with ten samples of the head pad with chamfered edges on a 12.5cm water phantom (On Revolution CT, GE Healthcare, Waukesha WI). The scans were taken with the following protocol: kVp 120, mA 600, 0.28 rot. Time, kernel STD#, DFOV 25cm, collimation 4cm, ASiR-V 50 and helical pitch 0.516.
Results: The artifact metric provides the standard deviation contribution due to the head pad, normalized by the noise in the image. For the traditional head pad the AM=17.9% of the image noise, and for the chamfered head pad the average AM=3.0% of the image noise.
Conclusion: A new head pad design with chamfered ear cutouts enables significant reduction in image artifacts.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: Authors are employees of GE Healthcare.
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