ASPECTS OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF WHOLE-BODY IMAGING-SYSTEMS

Regular quality control is one of the cornerstones of nuclear medicine and a prerequisite for adequate diagnostic imaging. Many papers have been published on quality control of planar and tomographic imaging sy stems. Up to now, however, only minor attention has been given to the assessment of the performance of whole body imaging systems. In this p aper we present a comprehensive set of test procedures including accep tance testing and regular quality control. It is not our purpose to pr esent a thorough analysis of the methods and results. The selection of the tests is discussed and the tests are described; some results are presented. In addition action thresholds are proposed. The quality con trol tests can be applied to systems with either a moving detector or a moving imaging table, and to both detectors with a large field of vi ew and detectors with a small field of view. The tests presented in th is paper do not require special phantoms or sources other than those u sed for quality control of stationary gamma cameras. They can be appli ed for acceptance testing and for performance testing in a regular qua lity assurance programme.