Pediatric radiology and radiological physics

Excerpt

The advent of computed tomography (CT) in the 1970s was the first major inroad of computers into the daily practice of radiology. The arrival of picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) at the turn of the end of the twentieth century demonstrates that radiology will be "all-digital" in the twentieth-first century, and this change will have profound implications for the practice of radiology. The analog world of radiology required far fewer choices to be made when acquiring and displaying images. The X-ray tube voltage (kV) was generally selected to be sufficient to penetrate the patient, and the X-ray tube output (mAs) was the amount required to blacken the film. Image display was determined by the film characteristic curve and was essentially "fixed." …