CTA Abdomen and Pelvis - Video Lesson

This CT protocol review is on CTA of the abdomen and pelvis. There's a few reasons that we would perform a CTA angiography scan of the abdomen in pelvis, we're really looking for an aneurysm, dissection, stenosis, or some kind of anomaly in the abdominal aorta, or branches. In the image to the right, the arrow is actually pointing at a massive aortic aneurysm, and this aneurysm has actually ruptured. And so that large gray area surrounding the aorta is a hematoma. This kind of thing doesn't happen very often, but this is the kind of thing that we're looking for when we perform this scan. So how do we perform this scan? It's actually very similar to imaging of the thoracic aorta, but with a few exceptions. The scan type helical for all of the normal reasons, it's faster, allows us to follow the bolus of contrast. The slice parameters are also very similar to imaging of the thoracic aorta, we'll use a two point five millimeter slice thickness for viewing, but as usual, we'll use