Coronary artery calcium quantification using contrast-enhanced dual-energy computed tomography scans in comparison with unenhanced single-energy scans

Extracting coronary artery calcium (CAC) scores from contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) images using dual-energy (DE) based material decomposition has been shown feasible, mainly through patient studies. However, the quantitative performance of such DE-based CAC scores, particularly per stenosis, is underexamined due to lack of reference standard and repeated scans. In this work we conducted a comprehensive quantitative comparative analysis of CAC scores obtained with DE and compare to conventional unenhanced single-energy (SE) CT scans through phantom studies. Synthetic vessels filled with iodinated blood mimicking material and containing calcium stenoses of different sizes and densities were scanned with a third generation dual-source CT scanner in a chest phantom using a DE coronary CT angiography protocol with three exposures/CTDIvol: auto-mAs/8mGy (automatic exposure), 160mAs/20mGy and 260mAs/34mGy and 10 repeats. As a control, a set of vessel phantoms without iodine was scanned using a standard SE CAC score protocol (3mGy). Calcium volume, mass and Agatston scores were estimated for each stenosis. For DE dataset, image-based three-material decomposition was applied to remove iodine before scoring. Performance of DE-based calcium scores were analyzed on a per-stenosis level and compared to SE-based scores. There was excellent correlation between the DE- and SE-based scores (correlation coefficient r: 0.92–0.98). Percent bias for the calcium volume and mass scores varied as a function of stenosis size and density for both modalities. Precision (coefficient of variation) improved with larger and denser stenoses for both DE- and SE-based calcium scores. DE-based scores (20 mGy and 34mGy) provided comparable per-stenosis precision to SE-based (3mGy). Our findings suggest that on a per-stenosis level, DE-based CAC scores from contrast-enhanced CT images can achieve comparable quantification performance to conventional SE-based scores. However, DE-based CAC scoring required more dose compared with SE for high per-stenosis precision so some caution is necessary with clinical DE-based CAC scoring.