Siemens EMOTION 16-Jun - Manual (Page 265)

Abdomen
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– In general, for abdominal studies such as liver, gall
bladder (query stones), pancreas, gastrointestinal
studies, focal lesion of the kidneys and CTA studies,
it is sufficient to use just water. Water is more effec-
tive than positive oral contrast agent in depicting the
linings of the stomach & intestines in post enhance-
ment studies. In addition, the use of water will not
obscure the blood vessels thus allowing CTA process-
ing to be performed easily afterwards.
– For patients with bowel obstruction, only water or
water-soluble contrast can be used. Barium suspen-
sion is a contraindication.
• Be careful when examining pheochromocytoma
patients. Administration of an IV CM injection in
such cases may trigger a hypertensive crisis!
• To further optimize MPR image quality we recom-
mend that you reduce one or more of the following:
collimation, reconstruction increment, and slice
width for image reconstruction.
Body Kernels
• As standard kernels for body tissue studies B30s or
B40s are recommended; softer images are obtained
with B20s or B10s (extremely soft). The kernels B31s
or B41s have about the same visual sharpness as
B30s, respectively, B40s, the image appearance,
however, is more agreeable due to a ”fine-grained”
noise structure; quite often, the low contrast detect-
ability is improved by using B31s, B41s instead of
B30s, B40s.
• For higher sharpness, as is required e.g. in patient
protocols for cervical spine, shoulder, extremities,
thorax, lung, the kernels B50s, B60s, B70s, B80s are
available.