TY - JOUR
T1 - Brain partial volume correction with point spreading function reconstruction in high-resolution digital PET
T2 - comparison with an MR-based method in FDG imaging
AU - Ibaraki, Masanobu
AU - Matsubara, Keisuke
AU - Shinohara, Yuki
AU - Shidahara, Miho
AU - Sato, Kaoru
AU - Yamamoto, Hiroyuki
AU - Kinoshita, Toshibumi
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the staff of the Akita Research Institute of Brain and Blood Vessels, especially Kazuhiro Takahashi and Takato Inomata for MR acquisition and performing the PET experiments. We also thank Takeshi Shimizu and Hiroyuki Arai of Siemens Healthineers for technical support with PET acquisition and reconstruction, and Prof. Hiroshi Ito and Takeyuki Nambu of Fukushima Medical University for lending a PET phantom. We thank Edanz (https://jp.edanz.com/ac) for editing a draft of this manuscript. The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
PY - 2022/8
Y1 - 2022/8
N2 - Objective: In quantitative positron emission tomography (PET) of the brain, partial volume effect due mainly to the finite spatial resolution of the PET scanner (> 3 mm full width at half maximum [FWHM]) is a primary source of error in the measurement of tracer uptake, especially in small structures such as the cerebral cortex (typically < 3 mm thickness). The aim of this study was to evaluate the partial volume correction (PVC) performance of point spread function-incorporated reconstruction (PSF reconstruction) in combination with the latest digital PET scanner. This evaluation was performed through direct comparisons with magnetic resonance imaging (MR)-based PVC (used as a reference method) in a human brain study. Methods: Ten healthy subjects underwent brain 18F-FDG PET (30-min acquisition) on a digital PET/CT system (Siemens Biograph Vision, 3.5-mm FWHM scanner resolution at the center of the field of view) and anatomical T1-weighted MR imaging for MR-based PVC. PSF reconstruction was applied with a wide range of iterations (4 to 256; 5 subsets). FDG uptake in the cerebral cortex was evaluated using the standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR) and compared between PSF reconstruction and MR-based PVC. Results: Cortical structures were visualized by PSF reconstruction with several tens of iterations and were anatomically well matched with the MR-derived cortical segments. Higher numbers of iterations resulted in higher cortical SUVRs, which approached those of MR-based PVC (1.76), although even with the maximum number of iterations they were still smaller by 16% (1.47), corresponding to approximately 1.5-mm FWHM of the effective spatial resolution. Conclusion: With the latest digital PET scanner, PSF reconstruction can be used as a PVC technique in brain PET, albeit with suboptimal resolution recovery. A relative advantage of PSF reconstruction is that it can be applied not only to cerebral cortical regions, but also to various small structures such as small brain nuclei that are hardly visualized on anatomical T1-weighted imaging, and thus hardly recovered by MR-based PVC.
AB - Objective: In quantitative positron emission tomography (PET) of the brain, partial volume effect due mainly to the finite spatial resolution of the PET scanner (> 3 mm full width at half maximum [FWHM]) is a primary source of error in the measurement of tracer uptake, especially in small structures such as the cerebral cortex (typically < 3 mm thickness). The aim of this study was to evaluate the partial volume correction (PVC) performance of point spread function-incorporated reconstruction (PSF reconstruction) in combination with the latest digital PET scanner. This evaluation was performed through direct comparisons with magnetic resonance imaging (MR)-based PVC (used as a reference method) in a human brain study. Methods: Ten healthy subjects underwent brain 18F-FDG PET (30-min acquisition) on a digital PET/CT system (Siemens Biograph Vision, 3.5-mm FWHM scanner resolution at the center of the field of view) and anatomical T1-weighted MR imaging for MR-based PVC. PSF reconstruction was applied with a wide range of iterations (4 to 256; 5 subsets). FDG uptake in the cerebral cortex was evaluated using the standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR) and compared between PSF reconstruction and MR-based PVC. Results: Cortical structures were visualized by PSF reconstruction with several tens of iterations and were anatomically well matched with the MR-derived cortical segments. Higher numbers of iterations resulted in higher cortical SUVRs, which approached those of MR-based PVC (1.76), although even with the maximum number of iterations they were still smaller by 16% (1.47), corresponding to approximately 1.5-mm FWHM of the effective spatial resolution. Conclusion: With the latest digital PET scanner, PSF reconstruction can be used as a PVC technique in brain PET, albeit with suboptimal resolution recovery. A relative advantage of PSF reconstruction is that it can be applied not only to cerebral cortical regions, but also to various small structures such as small brain nuclei that are hardly visualized on anatomical T1-weighted imaging, and thus hardly recovered by MR-based PVC.
KW - Brain
KW - Digital PET
KW - PSF reconstruction
KW - Partial volume correction
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U2 - 10.1007/s12149-022-01753-5
DO - 10.1007/s12149-022-01753-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 35616808
AN - SCOPUS:85130747366
SN - 0914-7187
VL - 36
SP - 717
EP - 727
JO - Annals of Nuclear Medicine
JF - Annals of Nuclear Medicine
IS - 8
ER -
