Reducing effective radiation dose with improved image quality of abdominal computed tomography scans for overweight patients

This work aimed to explore the effective radiation dose reduction for two Computed Tomography (CT) protocols for overweight and obese patients by using relevant physical techniques, all while obtaining acceptable image quality. Two CT protocols (A: n = 50, 120 kV/190 ± 60 mAs and B: n = 50, 100 kV/190 ± 60 mAs) were used when imaging a total of 100 patients. For the two groups, the Computed Tomography Dose Index (CTDI) and Dose-Length Product (DLP) data were collected to calculate the effective dose (ED), as well as standard deviation (SD). The Hounsfield Unit (HU) details were collected to calculate the image quality coefficients noise (N), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to–noise ratio (CNR). Noise, SNR and CNR were significantly different (p-value