had a couple of CT myself. Usually it's minutes of active scanning. But all the preparations/calibrations/whatever is done - you stay in machine at least half an hour+. They cut it down to 5.
Are you sure you aren’t mixing up CT and MRI? Our scheduled diagnostic CT slots are at every 15 minutes, of which probably 10 minutes are getting the patient on-off the table and positioned and 2 minutes are cleaning the room.
I do CT guided procedures every day. It’s seconds for data acquisition for any scanner made in the last 15 years. Even our ancient scanners from the early 2000s are this fast.
As a radiologist in a tertiary care centre operating CT scanners from four different manufacturers of various generations and age (0-20 years) I can assure you that there is no current CT protocol that requires minutes of active scanning time.
Even if you are using bolus tracking and a multiphase acquisition your actual scanning time will be far less than a minute.
We know in our centre the average patient time on the scanner is 10 minutes and we book patients every 15 minutes.
If a C- chest CT is taking 30+ minutes, something isn’t right. A standard workflow might have them every 30 minutes to allows extra bookings to be plugged in where needed, without ruining the rest of the day.
Or at least that’s the workflow in the places I’ve worked.
