Moderator: Prof. Erich Sorantin, MD, PhD
Head of Division of Pediatric Radiology
Medical University Graz
Graz, Austria

Background Information

Erich Sorantin, MD, was born in 1957 and after finishing high school, he studied Medicine at the University of Vienna graduating in 1982. Afterwards he worked in several hospitals, fulfilled training as general practitioner and became fully qualified as Pediatrician and Radiologist. In 1988, he joined the Radiology department at Medical University Graz, where he became a faculty member in 1994 and earned his professorship in 2002. Currently, Dr. Sorantin is the Head of the Division of Pediatric Radiology. Moreover, he coordinated a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary academic network in central Europe, which focuses on biomedical imaging and technology transfer of advanced pediatric care as well as radiation protection.

Dr. Sorantin was decorated with several awards and in 2018 he got a PhD honoris causa in Informatics from the Faculty of Science, Univ.of Szeged/HU. Dr. Sorantin has been married since 1984 and has three sons and three grandchildren.

Speaker: Dr. Elisa Aguirre, MD
Pediatric Radiologist
Hospital 12 de Octubre
Madrid, Spain

Dr. Elisa Aguirre is a pediatric radiologist at the Hospital 12 de Octubre, Madrid, for the last 12 years. She is actively involved in ultrasound departmental and interdepartmental working groups and clinical commissions. She is an author and co-author in several publications, congress communications, and internal clinical sessions.

Presentation Title: Abdominal Emergencies in Children

Abstract: Abdominal symptoms are the most common reason for pediatric emergency department visits. Radiologists can narrow the differential diagnosis by age and certain symptoms. Ultrasonography is usually the first line and main technique, enabling the diagnosis with the well-known advantages of this technique. Doppler ultrasound and microvascular imaging can add relevant information in pediatric abdominal emergencies. This is a review of the most common conditions in pediatric acute abdominal emergencies and the imaging signs in each condition.

Speaker: Dr. Samuel L. Brady, PhD
Clinical Medical Physicist, Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

As a medical physicist, Samuel Brady, PhD's, primary experience lies in developing and maintaining protocols for imaging efficacy and safety. His particular interest lies in dose-minimization for CT imaging techniques. This is a particularly important concept in pediatric radiology, where tissues are still developing and are thus especially susceptible to radiation damage.

Presentation Title: Impact of AI on CT Image Quality and Dose

Abstract: CT reconstruction has undergone a substantial change over the last decade with the introduction of iterative reconstruction (IR) and now with AI based-deep learning reconstruction (DLR). In this presentation, DLR will be compared to IR and filtered back-projection (FBP) reconstructions. Discussion on how DLR has impacted CT image quality, low-contrast detectability, and diagnostic confidence will be provided. DLR has shown the ability to improve in areas that IR is lacking, namely: noise magnitude reduction does not alter noise texture to the degree that IR did, and the noise texture found in DLR is more aligned with noise texture of an FBP reconstruction. Additionally, the dose reduction potential for DLR is shown to be greater than IR. For IR, the consensus was dose reduction should be limited to no more than 15-30% to preserve low-contrast detectability. For DLR, initial phantom and patient observer studies have shown acceptable dose reduction between 44-83% for both low- and high-contrast object detectability tasks.