Evaluation of the detection and diagnostic efficacy of low-dose chest CT examination for thoracic tumor lesions

LI Zhongdan; ZENG Xuzhi; DONG Ke; LI Qiang

Abstract：Objective To investigate the detection rate and diagnostic value of low-dose chest CT scans for thoracic tumor le-sions.Methods A prospective study randomly assigned 2000 patients into two groups,A and B,with 1000 patients in each group.Group A underwent conventional-dose chest CT scans,while Group B underwent low-dose chest CT scans.Combining clinical and radiological data,the image quality,disease detection rate,and accuracy of diagnosing benign and malignant pulmo-nary nodules were evaluated and compared between the two groups.Results Compared with conventional dose,the total radia-tion dose of low-dose chest CT scans decreased by 60.23%.Subjective image quality:there was a slight decrease in the quality of the mediastinal window,with statistically significant differences(P=0.001);however,there were no statistically significant dif-ferences in the image quality of lung and bone windows(P=0.753 and 0.501,respectively).Disease detection rate:there were no statistically significant differences in the detection rates of pulmonary nodules,thymic nodules,thyroid nodules,lymphoma,chest wall masses,kidney,and adrenal nodules(P=0.294,0.743,0.530,0.616,0.459,0.339,and 0.125,respectively);there were no statistically significant differences in the accuracy of diagnosing pre-cancerous lesions and early lung cancer among pulmonary nodules(P=0.345 and 0.648,respectively);however,there were statistically significant differences in diagnosing be-nign and indeterminate lesions(P=0.001 and 0.037,respectively).Conclusion Low-dose chest CT scans significantly reduce radiation dose compared to conventional CT scans while maintaining image quality sufficient for diagnosis.There are no signifi-cant statistical differences in the detection rates of various thoracic tumor diseases and the benign/malignant diagnosis of pulmo-nary nodules.However,there is a slight decrease in the accuracy of diagnosing some benign and indeterminate lesions.