Assessment of cervical spine CT by an image quality audit using qualitative and quantitative methods.

Introduction: To study the feasibility and assess the correlation of qualitative and quantitative methods for an image quality (IQ) audit of a Cervical spine CT.

Methods: Five radiologists retrospectively performed a blinded visual grading analysis (VGA) on 20 studies (10 from Protocol 1 and 10 from Protocol 2), using the RANZCR CT IQ Self-Audit worksheet. A Visual Grading Analysis Score (VGAS) and Area under the curve using Visual Grading Characteristics (AUC) were the figures of merit.