Effect of time-of-flight and point spread function modeling on detectability of myocardial defects in PET
- A-STAR-NUS Clinical Imaging and Research Centre (CIRC), Singapore 117599 (Singapore)
- Center for Advanced Medical Imaging Sciences, Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02114 and Radiology Department, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 (United States)
- Radiology Department, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 Department of Advanced Biomedical Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, Naples 80131 (Italy)
Purpose: A study was designed to investigate the impact of time-of-flight (TOF) and point spread function (PSF) modeling on the detectability of myocardial defects. Methods: Clinical FDG-PET data were used to generate populations of defect-present and defect-absent images. Defects were incorporated at three contrast levels, and images were reconstructed by ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM) iterative methods including ordinary Poisson, alone and with PSF, TOF, and PSF+TOF. Channelized Hotelling observer signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was the surrogate for human observer performance. Results: For three iterations, 12 subsets, and no postreconstruction smoothing, TOF improved overall defect detection SNR by 8.6% as compared to its non-TOF counterpart for all the defect contrasts. Due to the slow convergence of PSF reconstruction, PSF yielded 4.4% less SNR than non-PSF. For reconstruction parameters (iteration number and postreconstruction smoothing kernel size) optimizing observer SNR, PSF showed larger improvement for faint defects. The combination of TOF and PSF improved mean detection SNR as compared to non-TOF and non-PSF counterparts by 3.0% and 3.2%, respectively. Conclusions: For typical reconstruction protocol used in clinical practice, i.e., less than five iterations, TOF improved defect detectability. In contrast, PSF generally yielded less detectability. For large number of iterations, TOF+PSF yields the best observer performance.
- OSTI ID:
- 22250596
- Journal Information:
- Medical Physics, Journal Name: Medical Physics Journal Issue: 6 Vol. 41; ISSN 0094-2405; ISSN MPHYA6
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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