Observer Performance in the Detection and Classification of Malignant Hepatic Nodules and Masses with CT Image-Space Denoising and Iterative Reconstruction

At a moderate level of dose reduction (to a median size-specific dose estimate [SSDE] of 12.8 mGy), there was no performance difference in the identification of malignant hepatic nodules and masses for abdominal CT examinations regardless of whether noise-reduction methods were used; however, noise-reduction methods were required for lower-dose liver and pancreas examinations (when lowering the median SSDE from 26.8 to 16.3 mGy) to demonstrate noninferior performance compared with examinations performed with routine dose levels, potentially because of the smaller CT number differences between these malignancies and the background liver.