Motion Artifact - Video Lesson

This CT artifact lesson is dedicated to the inebriated man who fell off his bike, split his head open urinated in his bed and now can't stop wiggling on the CT scanner table. We'll be talking about motion artifact in CT. Motion artifact is exactly what it sounds like. It's caused by motion, whether voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary movement could include things like breathing or swallowing, and involuntary movement includes the cardiac motion and peristalsis in the bowels. When any part of the patient is moving during the CT exposure, it is possible that this can result in motion artifact. Motion artifact will sometimes look like streaks, it may appear as a double image, or it might also look like something we call misregistration. To the untrained eye, this image on the left kind of looks like the patient's head exploded during the middle of the CT scan. But when you compare this seal image to the coronal image, it's very obvious that the patient was just moving during the scan. And it's resulted in