Ultrafast pediatric chest computed tomography: comparison of free-breathing vs. breath-hold imaging with and without anesthesia in young children.

Background: General anesthesia (GA) or sedation has been used to obtain good-quality motion-free breath-hold chest CT scans in young children; however pulmonary atelectasis is a common and problematic accompaniment that can confound diagnostic utility. Dual-source multidetector CT permits ultrafast high-pitch sub-second examinations, minimizing motion artifact and potentially eliminating the need for a breath-hold.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of free-breathing ultrafast pediatric chest CT without GA and to compare it with breath-hold and non-breath-hold CT with GA.