Investigation of patient radiation exposure reduction through optimization of imaging conditions for stent enhancement processing in percutaneous coronary intervention: a retrospective study

Several percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) support technologies have been developed to improve procedural outcomes. We retrospectively investigated whether a real-time stent enhancement processing system (Stent View; SV) can effectively reduce radiation dose during PCI. The control group comprised individuals subjected to PCI using SV under standard imaging conditions, whereas the evaluation group included those subjected to PCI using SV under reduced dose (68% of the standard dose). We evaluated the balloon marker detection accuracy of SV (SVaccuracy\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${SV}_{accuracy}$$\end{document}) and calculated the cumulative air kerma (Ka,r) when SV was used. The mean SVaccuracy\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${SV}_{accuracy}$$\end{document} in the control and evaluation groups were 94.03 ± 14.52% and 94.62 ± 13.98%, respectively (p = 0.26), whereas the Ka,r were 111.15 ± 79.62 mGy and 65.22 ± 47.35 mGy, respectively. On average, appropriate optimization of the SV imaging conditions reduced patient radiation dose during SV imaging by 41.32% without affecting the accuracy of SV image reconstruction.