Toshiba announces European Roll-out of AIDR 3D Adaptive Iterative Dose Reduction
Toshiba's ongoing commitment to Patient Care and Dose reduction
ZOETERMEER, The Netherlands, November 2011 – Encouraged by field tests showing the efficiency of this new Iterative based reconstruction technology in clinical practice, Toshiba has decided that all new, and already installed, Aquilion ONE, Premium and PRIME scanners, should be entitled to this new technology. Without the need for substantial upgrade costs.

Clinical results show that AIDR 3D substantially reduces noise, while preserving sharp details, providing “natural looking” images. Reconstruction performed with AIDR 3D permits substantial dose reduction when compared to scans performed with traditional Filtered Back Projection (FBP) techniques. The AIDR 3D algorithm is designed to work in both the raw data and reconstruction domains and optimizes image quality for each particular body region.

As patients come in all shapes and sizes, automatic exposure control systems have proven to be very useful to maintain diagnostic image quality at a radiation dose suitable for each patient. It is therefore imperative that exposure control systems automatically react to dose reduction technology where made available to the customer. Toshiba’s SUREExposure 3D exposure control system is fully integrated into the imaging chain. With the integration of AIDR 3D in the scan protocol, the exposure is automatically reduced by up to 75% while assuring the best diagnostic image quality at the lowest dose for all patients.

Clinical experience in CHU Nancy, France

“When Toshiba installed AIDR 3D, our staff initially looked critically at the image quality for all type of scans. We may say that we are very happy with the Image Quality and surprised by the low dose levels. Follow-up studies, when compared to previous scans, already clearly demonstrated the impact of AIDR 3D” says Prof. Alain Blum-Moyse, Head of Radiology CHU Nancy, France.
“Noise is reduced dramatically. However this new technology is especially good in artifact suppression (streaks, beam-hardening, etc.). With AIDR 3D integrated in the SUREExposure 3D we were able to achieve a dose reduction by up to 75% by the same Standard Deviation (SD) for noise. But we found in some studies, with the same SD the image quality was so good, we could increase the SD even further, resulting in an even higher average dose reduction!! We are very enthusiastic with AIDR 3D, a very promising application is chest CT-scan with ultra low dose, I don’t think we will miss any nodule or lymph node with these scans.”

Key features of AIDR 3D
• Full integration in scan protocols for improved workflow
• Dose reduction in clinical setting  by up to 75%
• Minimal penalty in reconstruction times
• Noise reduction and improved Spatial Resolution
AIDR 3D (right) was applied to low dose kidney perfusion protocol: 100 kV, 25 mA
(Images courtesy of Keio University, Japan.)