Image Artifacts, Saturation and Virtual Grids

Patient and equipment

An artifact is anything on the image that is not part of the patient's anatomy, and it can hide or mimic pathology. Patient artifacts include jewelry, hair clips, gown snaps, braids, clothing, and motion. Remove what you can, and note what cannot be removed, such as an implant or monitoring line. Equipment artifacts come from the detector or the tube. Dead pixels or dead lines appear in the same place on every image from that detector, whatever the patient. Ghosting, or lag, is a faint leftover image from a previous high exposure that the detector has not fully cleared. Detector cracks, debris in the collimator, and calibration errors also repeat from patient to patient. Those need recalibration or service, not a repeat.