Improved cardiac CT with the photon counting CT scanner

(ref. BAP-2023-585)

Last modification : Thursday, August 24, 2023

The university hospital has the largest radiology department in Belgium, with over 400k exams/year. CT imaging is an important part of the activities. For many reasons, including the fact that CT imaging uses x-ray radiation, it is important to deliver images at excellent quality, yet with an acceptable dose. In line with the medical exposure directory (in Belgium, the RD Feb 2020), medical physicists are in charge of ensuring the consistent quality of the imaging chain. next to the 11 medical physicists in the hospital, supervising x-ray and MR imaging, 10 PhD students in medical physics work at topics that follow from observed challenges in the daily radiological practice. The department is involved in several national and European projects, including the AI-POD project.

- Make a quality improvement plan for cardiac CT imaging using new and stateof the art techniques.

- Quantify image quality as obtained from photon counting CT scanning,in comparison to the earlier generation of CT scanners

- Liaise with the partners in the EU project AI-POD

- Ensure all data collection is approved by the local ethical committee

- Make new data extraction pipelines and apply them in a large data setof patients

- Focus more in particular on specific subgroups such as the obesepopulation or the children

- master in biomedical sciences or medical physicistor equivalent

- team player, yet also able to work independently

- able to work very carefully

- creative as to propose measurement solutionsapplicable in clinical CT scans

- excited about writing and communication ofresults in a larger grop of project partners

Certification as a radiographer is an advantage;FANC recognized expert in medical physics in radiology is an advantage too.

In the frame of the EU4Health project AI-POD, wepropose to work at a PhD project in our team.

In this EU project, ultimately, an app will bedeveloped that predicts the risk of cardiac problems, especially in the groupof overweight or obese patients.

This app will start from lab data and adds dataextracted from high quality (photon counting) cardiac CT scans.

It is your task to optimize the quality of the CTscans by (1) finding the best protocol), (2) quantify the quality and (3)improve any new data extraction method. All aspects could be tested andvalidated in large groups of patients.

For more information please contact Prof. dr. Hilde Bosmans, tel.: +3216343751, mail: [email protected].

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