ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, CT urography (CTU; CT: computed tomography) has emerged as a promising tool for imaging patients with suspected urinary tract disease, due to its ability to image all aspects of the urinary tract at the same time. CT is already known to be superior to excretory urography (EU) and ultrasonography for detecting and characterizing renal masses (1,2) and in detecting urolithiasis (3,4). The only potential problem with using CT for examination of the urinary tract has been its perceived limited accuracy in evaluating the renal collecting systems, ureters, and bladder. If CT could be performed in such a way as to assess these components of the urinary tract with at least similar accuracy to EU, CT would then be able to completely replace EU. A comprehensive CT evaluation of the urinary tract would offer the advantage of allowing information that has until now been acquired from many different imaging studies, including EU, ultrasound, and standard CT, to be obtained from only one study. This is a tremendous advantage. Multiexamination work-ups are inconvenient. They require much patient effort (including repeat trips to an imaging center and bowel preparation) and are expensive.
