Purpose: A prospective, comparative study of 60 patients for optimizing contrast medium (CM) administration for spiral CT of the neck.
Methods: Prior to the investigation, the patients were randomly assigned to three groups (n = 20 each): a) conventional CT technique, interscan duration 10 s, CM volume 150 ml of Ultravist 300 (30 ml at a flow rate of 1.5 ml/s, the remaining 120 ml as maintenance dosage of 0.5 ml/s); b) so-called dynamic CT technique, interscan duration 5 s, CM volume 100 ml (200 ml at a flow rate of 2 ml/s and 80 ml with a flow rate of 0.5 ml/s); c) spiral CT technique, total investigation time to store the crude data was 30 s, a CM dosage of 50 ml at a flow rate of 2 ml/s (30 ml) in the first phase and 0.7 ml/s (20 ml) in the second phase was studied.
Results: The current evaluation of the CM time-density course, image quality, diagnostic efficiency, and investigation time showed that a good to very good contrast medium enhancement of the neck vessels was achieved in all groups so that pathological findings were well differentiated.
Conclusions: The CM volume could be reduced to a third of the original used amount without loss of diagnostic security by use of the spiral CT technique.