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Medical Physics / Volume 39 / Issue 1 / NUCLEAR MEDICINE PHYSICS

Med. Phys. 39, 179 (2012); http://dx.doi.org/10.1118/1.3665704 (16 pages)

An MR image-guided, voxel-based partial volume correction method for PET images

Hesheng Wang

Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30329

Baowei Fei

Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30329; Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30329; and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30329

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(Received 18 May 2011; accepted 7 November 2011; revised 7 November 2011; published online 15 December 2011)

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Purpose: Partial volume effect in positron emission tomography (PET) can cause incorrect quantification of radiopharmaceutical uptake in functional imaging. A PET partial volume correction method is presented to attenuate partial volume blurring and to yield voxel-based corrected PET images.
Methods: By modeling partial volume effect as a convolution of point spread function of the PET scanner, the reconstructed PET images are corrected by iterative deconvolution with an edge-preserving smoothness constraint. The constraint is constructed to restore discontinuities extracted from coregistered MR images but maintains the smoothness in radioactivity distribution. The correction is implemented in a Bayesian deconvolution framework and is solved by a conjugate gradient method. The performance of the method was compared with the geometric transfer matrix (GTM) method on a simulated dataset. The method was evaluated on synthesized brain FDG–PET data and phantom MRI–PET experiments.
Results: The true PET activity of objects with a size of greater than the full-width at half maximum of the point spread function has been effectively restored in the simulated data. The partial volume correction method is quantitatively comparable to the GTM method. For synthesized FDG–PET with true activity 0 μci/cc for cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), 228 μci/cc for white matter (WM), and 621 μci/cc for gray matter (GM), the method has improved the radioactivity quantification from 186 ± 16 μci/cc to 30 ± 7 μci/cc in CSF, 317 ± 15 μci/cc to 236 ± 10 μci/cc for WM, 438 ± 4 μci/cc to 592 ± 5 μci/cc for GM. Both visual and quantitative assessments show improvement of partial volume correction in the synthesized and phantom experiments.
Conclusions: The partial volume correction method improves the quantification of PET images. The method is comparable to the GTM method but does not need MR image segmentation or prior tracer distribution information. The voxel-based method can be particularly useful for combined PET/MRI studies.

© 2012 American Association of Physicists in Medicine

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research is supported in part by NIH Grant No. R01CA156775 (PI: Fei), Coulter Translational Research Grant (PIs: Fei and Hu), Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Clinicians and Scientists Award (PI: Fei), Emory Molecular and Translational Imaging Center (NIH Grant No. P50CA128301), SPORE in Head and Neck Cancer (NIH Grant No. P50CA128613), and Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (ACTSI) that is supported by the PHS Grant No. UL1 RR025008 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award program. The authors thank Dr. Anthonin Reilhac for providing us the simulated FDG–PET dataset.

Article Outline

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. MATERIALS AND METHODS
    1. Bayesian-based partial volume correction of PET images
    2. Prior information from anatomical MRI
    3. MRI-guided partial volume correction
    4. PET point spread function and images preprocessing
    5. Experiments with synthesized images
    6. Phantom imaging experiments
    7. Brain PET experiments
  3. RESULTS
    1. Results from synthesized images
    2. Phantom experiment results
    3. Brain PET study
  4. DISCUSSION
Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1118/1.3665704

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

belief networks, biomedical MRI, brain, conjugate gradient methods, deconvolution, image reconstruction, iterative methods, medical image processing, optical transfer function, phantoms, pharmaceuticals, positron emission tomography, radiation therapy, positron emission tomography (PET), partial volume correction, deconvolution, edge preserving, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

PACS

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0094-2405 (print)  

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef American Association of Physicists in Medicine

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Medical Physics is an official science journal of the AAPM and of the COMP/CCPM/IOMP
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