Shoulder
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General Hints
• Topogram: AP, 256 mm.
• Patient positioning:
Patient lying in supine position, the uninjured arm
placed above the head, the injured arm placed flat
against his body. If only one side is under investiga-
tion, position this side in the center and support the
other side with a Bocollo pillow (optional).
• If only one side is examined, it is advisable to enter
the side in the comment line on the routine card.
• Contrast medium is required for soft tissue mass
evaluation.
• To further optimize MPR image quality we recom-
mend that you reduce one or more of the following:
collimation, reconstruction increment, and slice
width for image reconstruction.
Body Kernels
• As standard kernels for body tissue studies B30s or
B40s are recommended; softer images are obtained
with B20s or B10s (extremely soft). The kernels B31s
or B41s have about the same visual sharpness as
B30s, respectively, B40s, the image appearance,
however, is more agreeable due to a ”fine-grained”
noise structure; quite often, the low contrast detect-
ability is improved by using B31s, B41s instead of
B30s, B40s.
• For higher sharpness, as is required e.g. in patient
protocols for cervical spine, shoulder, extremities,
thorax, lung, the kernels B50s, B60s, B70s, B80s are
available.