For quite some time, iterative reconstruction has been heavily discussed in the CT community as a highly promising method to achieve significant dose reduction without compromising image quality. And once again Siemens Healthineers has set the benchmark on low dose imaging with the introduction of the first raw-data based iterative reconstruction – SAFIRE.
As determined from SOMATOM Definition Flash data, SAFIRE enables up to 60% dose reduction.
In clinical practice, the use of SAFIRE may reduce CT patient dose depending on the clinical task, patient size, anatomical location, and clinical practice. A consultation with a radiologist and a physicist should be made to determine the appropriate dose to obtain diagnostic image quality for the particular clinical task. The following test method was used to determine a 54 to 60% dose reduction when using the SAFIRE reconstruction software. Noise, CT numbers, homogeneity, low-contrast resolution and high contrast resolution were assessed in a Gammex 438 phantom. Low dose data reconstructed with SAFIRE showed the same image quality compared to full dose data based on this test. Data on file.