Cerebral CT Perfusion in Acute Stroke: The Effect of Lowering the Tube Load and Sampling Rate on the Reproducibility of Parametric Maps

The aim of this study was to define lower dose parameters (tube load and temporal sampling) for CT perfusion that still preserve the diagnostic efficiency of the derived parametric maps. Ninety stroke CT examinations from four clinical sites with 1 s temporal sampling and a range of tube loads (mAs) (100–180) were studied. Realistic CT noise was retrospectively added to simulate a CT perfusion protocol, with a maximum reduction of 40% tube load (mAs) combined with increased sampling intervals (up to 3 s). Perfusion maps from the original and simulated protocols were compared by: (a) similarity using a voxel-wise Pearson’s correlation coefficient r with in-house software; (b) volumetric analysis of the infarcted and hypoperfused volumes using commercial software. Pearson’s r values varied for the different perfusion metrics from 0.1 to 0.85. The mean slope of increase and cerebral blood volume present the highest r values, remaining consistently above 0.7 for all protocol versions with 2 s sampling interval. Reduction of the sampling rate from 2 s to 1 s had only modest impacts on a TMAX volume of 0.4 mL (IQR −1–3) (p = 0.04) and core volume of −1.1 mL (IQR −4–0) (p < 0.001), indicating dose savings of 50%, with no practical loss of diagnostic accuracy. The lowest possible dose protocol was 2 s temporal sampling and a tube load of 100 mAs.