Recovery correction for quantitation in emission tomography: a feasibilitystudy

In emission tomography, the spread of regional tracer uptake to surrounding areas caused by limited spatial resolution of the tomograph must be taken into account when quantitating activity concentrations in vivo. Assuming li nearity and stationarity, the relationship between imaged activity concentr ation and true activity concentration is only dependent on the geometric re lationship between the limited spatial resolution of the tomograph in all t hree dimensions and the three-dimensional size and shape of the object, In particular it is independent of the type of object studied. This concept is characterized by the term "recovery coefficient". Recovery effects can be corrected for by recovery coefficients determined in a calibration measurem ent for lesions of simple geometrical shape. This method works on anatomica l structures that can be approximated to simple geometrical objects. The ai m of this study was to investigate whether recovery correction of appropria te structures is feasible in a clinical setting. Measurements were done on a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner in the 2D and 3D acquisition m ode and on an analogue and digital single-photon emission tomography (SPET) system using commercially available software for image reconstruction and correction of absorption and scatter effects. The results of hot spot and c old spot phantom measurements were compared to validate the assumed conditi ons of linearity and stationarity. It can be concluded that a recovery corr ection is feasible for PET scanners down to lesions measuring about 1.5xFWH M in size, whereas with simple correction schemes, which are widely availab le, an object-independent recovery correction for SPET cannot be performed. This result can be attributed to imperfections in the commercially availab le methods for attenuation and scatter correction in SPET, which are only a pproximate.