Dear AuntMinnie Europe member,
Harder, better, faster, stronger: This week’s CT stories come in true Daft Punk fashion. From photon-counting CT taking on hard-to-assess coronary stents to AI shaving time off chest CT reporting, some of the latest studies are about squeezing more performance from the modality, without losing sight of dose and access.
A new Austrian study from the Medical University of Innsbruck found that ultrahigh-resolution PCCT reduced the proportion of nondiagnostic coronary stents from 46.8% with conventional CT to just 1.1%. Diagnostic performance against invasive angiography was encouraging too, particularly for ruling out significant in-stent restenosis, although false positives and a small invasive-validation cohort mean invasive angiography is not out of the picture yet.
Faster, too, a chest CT study found that AI assistance cut reporting time, while exploratory modeling suggested a reduction of around half a full-time equivalent in radiologist workload.
Yet systems need to keep up with the pace. Europe’s lung cancer screening rollout continues to expose gaps in training and implementation. A SOLACE survey found substantial variation in lung screening education, a reminder that harmonized protocols, nodule management, reporting, and pathways are still a work in progress.
CT is also being asked to work harder by extracting more information from scans already being performed. Researchers found that breast radiotherapy planning CT can help identify ischemic heart disease risk as cardiovascular disease becomes a competing long-term risk in women surviving early-stage breast cancer.
And let’s not forget about quality. A five-star CT quality rating system showed strong reproducibility, with three-reader concordance reaching up to 93% in highly standardized centers.
On contrast safety, a Korean study of almost 116,000 recipients of iodinated contrast media added evidence on risk factors for hypersensitivity reactions, while European expert commentary helped place the findings in the context of current practice.
And stronger imaging does not mean radiation dose can fade into the background. Research examining PET/CT found that the CT component, rather than FDG, drove measurable chromosome damage, playing into the argument that standard-dose CT should be reserved for situations where the additional diagnostic information is needed.
At the policy level, CT also has a growing role in Europe’s cardiovascular ambitions. The European Commission’s Safe Hearts Plan puts prevention and earlier diagnosis firmly on the agenda, with radiology and nuclear medicine expected to play central roles. Better scanners are only half of the story, reimbursement and workforce will decide how much reaches patients
These articles are just a glimpse. Explore our full CT content area for everything we’ve published.
Claudia Tschabuschnig
Associate Editor
AuntMinnieEurope.com