Contrast Archives - The Imaging Wire

The Cost of Contrast Reactions

Posted on October 21, 2026October 21, 2026 by Brian Casey

Everyone agrees that contrast media reactions are bad for patients. But contrast reactions also have an economic cost to imaging facilities, a cost that’s detailed in a new article in JACR.

Patient contrast reactions are one of the main reasons why medical imaging isn’t always as noninvasive as everyone likes to think it is.

Reactions can range from mild responses like skin rashes to more severe and even fatal episodes, like the case of a Brazilian woman who died after getting CT contrast in 2025.

But contrast reactions can also be expensive for medical imaging facilities, even though they occur rarely (0.2% to 0.7% of scans, per published literature, with severe reactions far less common).

To get a handle on these expenses, the Mayo Clinic’s Jennifer McDonald, PhD, and Robert McDonald, MD, PhD, tracked the costs involved in preventing and managing contrast reactions over five years at their institution.

The McDonalds tracked 364k CT studies and 254k MRI exams that used contrast from 2019 to 2024 at Mayo Clinic, recording the number of physiologic or allergic-like patient reactions and the cost of medications and treatment for them, finding…

The reaction rate was slightly higher for CT compared to MRI (0.3% vs. 0.21%).
More CT cases than MRI required transfer to the emergency department (6.3% vs. 3.5%) or escalation to hospital care (2.1% vs. 0.2%).
Median costs per patient across the entire dataset were higher for CT than MRI ($15 vs. $1.66).
But severe reactions were expensive, with one CT case costing $238k for a nine-day hospital stay, while the most severe MRI case cost $7.4k for a one-day stay.
The amount of extra time required in the radiology department was similar between CT and MRI (25 and 27 minutes).
Two patients in the cohort died, but for reasons unrelated to contrast administration.

The authors then calculated the amount of extra work required in radiology to manage reactions, which they estimated came out to 13 additional hours in CT and 9.5 hours in MRI per 10k exams.

The Takeaway

Most radiology departments are doing a good job keeping contrast reactions to a minimum, while vendors are developing new agents with better safety profiles. The new study provides a useful benchmark against which imaging facilities can measure themselves.

Risks of Rising Contrast Use

Posted on December 7, 2025December 7, 2025 by Brian Casey

The use of contrast media in medical imaging procedures has been rising steadily in recent years, a trend that creates environmental risks. So says a new study in JAMA Network Open that documents growth in contrast use over the past 13 years.

Contrast is an essential part of many imaging exams, helping radiologists better visualize pathology that might be harder to see on unenhanced scans.

But contrast use also comes with a wide array of risks, from patient reactions that on rare occasions can be fatal to environmental buildup of contrast that’s excreted from patients after exams and makes its way into local waterways – including drinking water.

This latter phenomenon is what’s explored in the new paper, authored by researchers from the ACR’s Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute.

They analyzed Medicare claims from 2011 to 2024 for 169M contrast-enhanced imaging exams that involved the use of 13.5B milliliters of contrast for both CT and MRI studies.

HPI’s analysis found…

Iodinated CT contrast use grew 5.2% and gadolinium MRI was up 3.5% from 2014 to 2019.
Contrast use fell 9.6% for CT and 15.6% for MRI during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but then rebounded afterward.
A small number of exams accounted for most of the CT contrast usage, such as CT abdomen and pelvis (4.4B mL) and CT chest (2.7B mL).
MRI numbers were far lower, such as for brain MRI scans (221M mL) and abdominal MRI studies (70M).

So what can radiology do? Simply reducing contrast use for environmental reasons isn’t much of a solution, as it has implications not only for patient care but also for medical malpractice risk.

But ongoing efforts to reduce inappropriate imaging would have a follow-on effect of also lowering contrast use, as would protocols to reduce contrast use for patient safety reasons (the introduction of high-relaxivity gadolinium-based agents that cut MRI contrast dose by 50% is a great example).

The authors also cite the development of AI-based techniques that could create contrast-like exams from existing non-contrast data, offering AI developers another possible segment to target.

The Takeaway

The new study offers an interesting twist in the debate over contrast reduction, pointing out that efforts to reduce unnecessary contrast use promise to benefit not only patients but also the planet.

The Value of CT Contrast

Posted on May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Brian Casey

If there was a tool available that would automatically improve your job performance by nearly one-third, you’d want to use it, right? (And no, we’re not talking about ChatGPT.) The tool is contrast media, and a new study in JAMA Surgery found that the use of contrast in emergency CT exams improved the diagnostic accuracy of radiologists by 30%.

Radiology has a love-hate relationship with contrast. Contrast media unquestionably improves medical image quality, but it also adds a layer of complexity to imaging operations. Patients have to be screened and monitored for contrast allergies and reactions, IV lines have to be placed, injectors have to be monitored and maintained.

Radiology researchers and clinicians have explored a variety of methods for non-contrast imaging, in particular in the emergency setting, where the time spent setting up a contrast exam could delay patient care.

But while the risks of giving contrast are extensively debated, what are the risks of not using it? Researchers from multiple US institutions sought to answer this question in a study of 201 patients who got CT scans in emergency departments for acute abdominal pain over 3 weeks in 2017. All patients were scanned on Siemens Healthineers’ Somatom Force dual-source dual-energy CT scanner.

The original scans were contrast-enhanced, and a dual-energy technique was used to produce non-contrast images. Both sets of images were read by faculty and resident radiologists. Compared to the gold standard of contrast CT at 100%, findings included:

Diagnostic accuracy of unenhanced CT was 70%, or 30 percentage points lower than contrast CT
Faculty radiologists were more accurate than residents for primary diagnoses (82% vs. 76%), but less accurate for actionable secondary diagnoses (87% vs. 90%)
Faculty made fewer false-negative primary diagnoses than residents (38% vs. 62%)
False-negative and false-positive results were common (19% and 14%, respectively)

The Takeaway

Reducing the use of contrast is a worthy goal, but it carries risks of its own, as this study indicates. False-negative interpretations are among the worst kinds of radiology errors with non-contrast exams, and clinicians should weigh the diagnostic penalty of withholding contrast media in the emergency setting, especially given the extremely low rate of contrast reactions in low-risk patients.

GE HealthCare’s MRI Contrast Play

Posted on April 30, 2023April 28, 2023 by Brian Casey

GE HealthCare has expanded its MRI contrast portfolio with the European debut of Pixxoscan. The gadolinium-based contrast agent gives GE another macrocyclic gadolinium-based contrast agent to sell in Europe, in addition to its Clariscan GBCA.

MRI contrast developers have been working to address one of the most persistent problems in MRI: their reliance on gadolinium. Gadolinium works great for lighting up MR images, but it’s a toxic metal that has to be bonded with a chelate – a sort of molecular cage – in order to be used safely in humans.

Pixxoscan is a macrocyclic GBCA that’s based on gadobutrol, a formulation already used in Bayer’s Gadovist GBCA and that’s now available generically. Macrocyclic GBCAs are considered more stable and less likely to release gadolinium than linear agents.

Most linear GBCAs have been barred from the European market since 2017. The FDA never took a similar approach, but the US market has largely shifted from linear GBCAs to macrocyclic agents due to safety concerns.

GE HealthCare highlighted that Pixxoscan is formulated at twice the concentration of gadolinium ions, which reportedly enables it to be used at half the injection volume of other GBCAs. The company also said that the agent’s cage-like macrocyclic chelate provides high kinetic stability.

Pixxoscan will start shipping initially in Austria, and GE HealthCare expects to expand it across Europe. A spokesperson didn’t confirm plans for a US rollout.

Pixxoscan’s launch comes as two of GE HealthCare’s competitors, Guerbet and Bracco, are rolling out their formulations of gadopiclenol, a high-relaxivity agent that can be used at half the dose of conventional GBCAs. The companies collaborated on the development of the agent, which Guerbet is selling as Elucirem and Bracco as Vueway.

The Takeaway

GE HealthCare’s launch of Pixxoscan gives the company another macrocyclic agent to sell in Europe in addition to Clariscan. The question is how the agent will compete with gadopiclenol from Bracco and Guerbet, which are already touting its dose and relaxivity advantages.

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