CT Saline Advantage

MEDRAD's Stellant D Injection System brings saline flush capability to your CT procedures. The addition of saline to contrast injections has proven clinical advantages for imaging professionals. Here is some additional information about saline use in CT.

What can saline flush do?

• Used as a "bolus chaser", saline creates a tighter bolus.
• Independent research indicates that saline flush may reduce image artifacts in thoracic CT applications (1)

Saline Flush

• Complements Multidetector CT (MDCT)
• Creates tight bolus
• Allows clinicians to perform complex protocols like CTA, Cardiac CT
• Enables precisely-timed contrast delivery (pure arterial phase)
• Promotes efficient contrast use (1)
• Allows sequential injections of contrast & saline
• Reduces artifacts and improves attenuation curve in thoracic CT (1)

Right Place, Right Time

Saline flush helps get contrast to the right place at the right time. The attenuation curve at the top demonstrates the theoretical ideal enhancement, putting the exact volume of contrast into the area of interest at the time of the scan. Achieving this ideal attenuation curve would require an impractically complicated, ideal bolus.

The illustration at the bottom shows that optimized enhancement, approximating the ideal, is possible with saline flush. Saline helps create a practically applicable, biphasic bolus that optimizes the contrast in the area of interest during the scan (2,3).

(1) Haage, Patrick, et al. "Reduction of Contrast Material Dose and Artifacts by a Saline Flush Using a Double Power Injector in Helical CT of the Thorax." AJR: 174, April 2000.

(2) Cademartiri, Filippo, et al. "Parameters Affecting Bolus Geometry in CTA: A Review." Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography 26(4):598-607.

(3) Fleischmann, Dominik and Karl Hittmair. "Mathematical Analysis of Arterial Enhancement and Optimization of Bolus Geometry for CT Angiography Using the Discrete Fourier Transform." Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography 23(3):474-484.