The partial volume effect can be defined as the loss of apparent activity in small objects or regions because of the limited resolution of the imaging system. It occurs in medical imaging and more generally in biological imaging such as positron emission tomography and single-photon emission computed tomography.

What is partial Voluming in CT?

Partial volume artifact occurs when tissues of widely different absorption are encompassed on the same CT voxel producing a beam attenuation proportional to the average value of these tissues.

What is partial volume effect in CT scan?

Because each pixel in a CT image represents the attenuation properties of a specific material volume, if that volume is comprised of a number of different substances then the resulting CT value represents some average of their properties. This is termed the partial-volume effect.