CT to search for urinary tract stone is a very commonly performed procedure because both negative and positive results may have significant impact on subsequent patient care. Often the patients are younger since stones can occur at any age.

This article presents very encouraging news about significantly lowering the dose of a CT for urinary stones by using statistical iterative reconstruction – yet with acceptable image quality and no loss of diagnostic power.

This report adds to a rapidly growing body of data about both statistical iterative reconstruction and model based iterative reconstruction for various types of CT exams.  This body of data almost uniformly reports substantial patient radiation dose reduction in the 30% to 60% range with equal or even better image quality.