Low-Dose CT Quality Assurance at Scale: Automated Detection of Overscanning, Underscanning, and Image Noise.

Authors

Wienholt P, Hermans A, Siepmann R, Kuhl C, Pinto Dos Santos D, Nebelung S, Truhn D

Affiliations

• Lab for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, 52074 Aachen, Germany.
• Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, 52074 Aachen, Germany.
• Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 55131 Mainz, Germany.

Abstract

Automated quality assurance is essential for low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) lung screening, yet manual checks strain clinical workflows. We present a fully automated artificial intelligence tool that quantifies scan coverage and image noise in LDCT without user input. Lungs and the aorta are segmented to measure cranial/caudal over- and underscanning, and noise is computed as the standard deviation of Hounsfield units (HUs) within descending aortic blood, normalized to a 1 mm3 voxel. Performance was verified in a reader study of 98 LDCT scans from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), and then applied to 38,834 NLST scans reconstructed with a standard kernel. In the reader study, lung masks were rated ≥"Nearly Perfect" in 90.8% and aorta-blood masks in 96.9% of cases. Across 38,834 scans, mean overscanning distances were 31.21 mm caudally and 14.54 mm cranially; underscanning occurred in 4.36% (caudal) and 0.89% (cranial). The tool enables objective, large-scale monitoring of LDCT quality-reducing routine manual workload through exception-based human oversight, flagging protocol deviations, and supporting cross-center benchmarking-and may facilitate dose optimization by reducing systematic over- and underscanning.