Mario Scheweder MSc

Clinical computed tomography (CT) is a highly established diagnostic imaging tool in healthcare. Due to its high impact on medical diagnosis and therapy planning, the technology is evolving rapidly. ALARA (“As low as reasonably achievable”) in terms of radiation exposure for medical purposes with the primary intention to bring health benefits to the individual is one of the most important principles for acquiring medical images with radiation exposure. Hence, the optimization of image acquisition is an important part of clinical practice and is declared within the medical radiation protection regulation (§4 (1) MedSchV). In addition, the medical radiation regulation expels reference values for diagnostic CT imaging as a minimum requirement in clinical practice. However, due to new hardware technologies in computer tomography scanners as well as new acquisition and reconstruction techniques of imaging data the potential reduction of radiation exposure in medical CT imaging expands. Furthermore, especially with the availability of integrated photon counting detectors into clinical scanners, enhanced quantitative approaches lead to better tissue characterization and can add additional diagnostic information to raise the disease prognosis.

The diagnosis of interstitial lung disease (ILD) due to its complex pathologic mechanisms and similar clinical features is quite difficult to achieve. A possible approach to track local changes in lung tissue can be radiological imaging, commonly through high resolution computed tomography (HRCT). However, due to the complex character of ILDs, results from HRCT are limited because of the occurrence of similar radiological features and the lack of defining exposed tissue caused by inflammation.