Greetings all, I'm at the end of my rope here about CTA Chest exams and the timing for getting optimal contrast in the pulmonary arteries. With the rise of covid, our small facility, 4 bed ER docs have become obsessed with CTA Chest for PE's and we have been doing more lately (compared to what we usually do as a small facility). We also have been getting, more than we would like, reports back with suboptimal contrast timing. I personally feel like I'm just shooting in the dark on most of mine and I simply don't even know what I'm doing wrong. We have a GE Revolution EVO scanner. Just to get some things out of the way, we have very little control over a lot of things such as protocols due to our manager. We use 125 mL syringes of Optiray 320 as our contrast injected at 4 - 4.5 ml/s for CTA's and we do not use saline with out contrast because of our manager. I've been taught by another tech to do smart prep with the monitor slice set just below the corina and the ellipse ROI in the pulmonary artery and the dynamic transition is set default to go at 100 HU. I've also tried no dynamic transition and waiting for the first sign of flush and manually scanning. Sometimes they are ok, other times it's awful. Just this morning I had one that was completely and utterly non diagnosistic and I have no clue what happened. I had my monitor phase set up very clearly in the pulmonary artery and it went at 100 HU and it was just awful. I'm not the only one getting suboptimal studies for CTA Chests but im just so frustrated because I don't like sending shit, but I haven't got a clue what I'm doing wrong to fix it. I work PRN and usually get 1-2 full days a week right now and a few nights on call a week and don't actually get too terribly many CTA Chests, I've probably done under 20 total by myself and it used to be weeks/months in between but we have been doing more and more. Any and a tips, tricks, or anything I can read and study because I simply am lost and it's stressing me out.
[link] [comments]
source https://www.reddit.com/r/Radiology/comments/qz2rii/cta_chest_timing/
Comments
Post a Comment