Approximately what is the digital size of a standard CT image reconstructed on a 512x512 matrix?

In computed tomography, the size of an image can be derived by considering the matrix dimensions and the bit depth per pixel. A standard CT image reconstructed on a 512 x 512 matrix contains 262,144 pixels (since 512 multiplied by 512 equals 262,144).

Typically, CT images have a bit depth of 12 to 16 bits per pixel, commonly using 16 bits for calculation purposes. When using 16 bits per pixel, the total number of bits required to represent the image is calculated as follows:

262,144 pixels × 16 bits/pixel = 4,194,304 bits.

To convert bits to bytes, divide by 8 (since there are 8 bits in a byte):

4,194,304 bits ÷ 8 = 524,288 bytes.

Since 1 MB equals 1,024,000 bytes, the digital size can also be converted to megabytes by dividing by 1,024:

524,288 bytes ÷ 1,024 = 512 MB.

However, the decrease can be attributed to common usage practices in CT for storing images with lossy compression or using fewer bits for display purposes, leading to an approximate storage size aligning with 0