TABLE OF CONTENTS PATRICK J. LA RIVI RE
University of Chicago, Department of Radiology and Committee on Medical Physics, 5841 S. Maryland Ave., MG- 1037
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
pjlarivi@midway.uchicago.edu
One of the most significant recent developments in CT technology has been the emergence of multislice systems. In contrast to single-slice helical CT systems, in which the source illuminates a single row of detector elements, the multislice systems feature a two-dimensional array of detector elements, with up to 64 rows in the longitudinal direction in the latest generation of scanners. These scanners radically improve the tradeoffs between imaging time, volume coverage, and longitudinal resolution that constrain any CT study. In this chapter, we discuss the technical background of multislice CT, as well as the most common CT clinical applications and the impact multislice CT has had on them. The new imaging geometry associated with multislice scanners gives rise to new image reconstruction and visualization challenges, and we discuss these at some length. Other topics addressed include sampling and aliasing and dose issues.
Keywords: Computed tomography; helical scan; conebeam tomography; multislice tomography.
In multislice Computed Tomography (CT), the X-ray source illuminates a curved or flat two-dimensional array of detector elements, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The emergence of multislice scanners has radically improved the tradeoffs between imaging time, volume coverage, and longitudinal resolution that constrain any CT study. The amount of time available for a CT scan is typically limited by the length of time...
