Performance of ultralow-dose CT with iterative reconstruction in lung cancer screening: limiting radiation exposure to the equivalent of conventional chest X-ray imaging

To investigate the detection rate of pulmonary nodules in ultralow-dose CT acquisitions.In this lung phantom study, 232 nodules (115 solid, 117 ground-glass) of different sizes were randomly distributed in a lung phantom in 60 different arrangements. Every arrangement was acquired once with standard radiation dose (100 kVp, 100 references mAs) and once with ultralow radiation dose (80 kVp, 6 mAs). Iterative reconstruction was used with optimized...