Cardiac: Morphology

Abstract

As previously described, the underlying concept of Dual Source CT is the use of two x-ray tubes and two corresponding detector arrays to acquire a half gantry rotation's worth of data with only a quarter-scan gantry rotation, effectively cutting the acquisition time in half.1 With a gantry rotation time of 0.33 seconds, the SOMATOM Definition system allows 64 channels of CT data to be acquired with a temporal resolution of 83 ms when operated in the cardiac mode. Unlike previous generations of multi-detector row CTs, the improved temporal resolution provided by DSCT is independent of patient heart rates.1 This improved temporal resolution and the resulting ability of DSCT to provide motion-free images of the heart over a wide range of patient heart rates is the predominant advantage of DSCT over previous generations of multi-detector row CTs for the evaluation of cardiac morphology. © 2008 Springer Medizin Verlag Heidelberg.