Contrast Resolution - Video Lesson

Welcome back. This image quality lesson is about contrast resolution. There's a few different ways that we could define contrast resolution, but I like to think about it like this. Contrast resolution is basically the ability of the scanner to differentiate between objects with very similar physical densities. And this is actually one of the great advantages of CT compared to conventional radiography. The image on the left is just a regular old x-ray of a patient's abdomen, And even though we can see a lot of information in this image, all of the structures inside of the patient's abdomen have basically the same level of physical density And so they're all given the same shade of gray and they all basically blend together. And so a traditional radiograph on own without any kind of contrast enhancement actually has poor contrast resolution because an x-ray image does not have the ability to give a good differentiation between structures that have similar physical density. On the other hand, we can look at the image to the right, and this is a