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Background

Poor contrast enhancement is related to issues with examination execution, contrast prescription, computed tomography (CT) protocols, and patient conditions. Currently, our community has no metric to monitor true enhancement on routine single-phase examinations because this requires knowledge of both pre-and postcontrast CT number.

Purpose

We propose an automatable solution to quantifying contrast enhancement without requiring a dedicated noncontrast series.

Methods

The difference in CT number between a target region in an enhanced and unenhanced image defines the metric “quantification of iodine contrast enhancement”(Q-ICE). Quantification of iodine contrast enhancement uses the noncontrast bolus tracking baseline image from routine abdominal examinations, which mitigates the need for a dedicated noncontrast series. We applied this method retrospectively to 312 patient livers …