# CPT 70496

> Medicare paid $297.16 for CPT 70496 in the office (non-facility) setting and $297.16 in a facility under the Q2 2017 Physician Fee Schedule, effective April 2017. These are the national allowed amounts before the ~2% sequestration cut and before locality (GPCI) adjustment. This price has been unchanged since Q1 2017, when it increased 0.2%.

## What it is

A CT scan of the arteries and veins inside the skull, timed so that contrast dye injected into an arm vein is filling the brain vessels at the moment the images are captured. The raw slices are then rebuilt on a workstation into three-dimensional pictures of the vessel tree, and that image processing and its interpretation are part of the service. It answers vessel questions - is one blocked, narrowed, ballooned, or bleeding - rather than the tissue questions a routine head CT answers.

## Selected release

- Release: Q2 2017 (2017 B)
- Effective: April 1 – June 30, 2017
- Status indicator: A
- Office (non-facility) national allowed amount: $297.16
- Facility national allowed amount: $297.16
- Sequestration: not applied

## RVUs and formula

- Work RVU: 1.75
- Office (non-facility) practice expense RVU: 6.41
- Facility practice expense RVU: 6.41
- Malpractice RVU: 0.12
- Conversion factor: 35.8887
- Formula: `(work_rvu × work_gpci + pe_rvu × pe_gpci + mp_rvu × mp_gpci) × conversion_factor`

## Source and citation

- Source: Physician relative value file (Q2 2017)
- CMS file: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service-payment/physicianfeesched/downloads/rvu17b.zip
- Parsed file: PPRRVU17_V0209.csv, row 11,468
- Canonical page: https://localishealth.com/cpt/70496/2017/A
- Release-specific citation URL: https://localishealth.com/cpt/70496/2017/B
- Last significant update: 2026-08-04T03:07:42+00:00