Abstract

In clinical practice accurate and precise quantification of PET images is of crucial importance especially for tumor staging when comparing pre- and post- treatment scans. For example a change in the standardized uptake values (SUV) of 10-20% can discriminate whether a treatment is effective or not. However, several factors cause degradation of the accuracy and precision of quantitative information. Iterative reconstruction methods can help towards more accurate tumor delineation and potentially quantification. However, the most commonly used reconstruction technique (Ordered Subset Expectation Maximization, OSEM) has pitfalls that are critical for quantification: bias (e.g. at early iterations and at low count statistics) and noise (e.g. at late iterations). The aim of this work is to evaluate the quantitative performance of existing reconstruction algorithms with acquired phantom data and PET/CT ( 18F-fluoride and 11C-choline) scans of patients with metastatic prostate cancer. Data are reconstructed with three different ordered subset (OS) methods: OSEM, OS Maximum A Posteriori One Step Late (OSMAPOSL) with the Median Root Prior and OS Separable Paraboloidal Surrogate (OSSPS) with the Quadratic Prior. These three algorithms are available with the open source Software for Tomographic Image Reconstruction (STIR, http://stir.sf.net). We investigate the SUVmax and SUVmean for each of the three reconstruction methods and how they change over sub-iteration. Our findings show that the subset limit cycle behavior does not affect the comparison of the SUV estimates for identical acquisition. On the other hand fine parameter tuning is necessary to achieve better tradeoff between convergence, bias and noise.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Print)9781479905348
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Event2013 60th IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, NSS/MIC 2013 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 27 Oct 20132 Nov 2013

Conference

Conference2013 60th IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, NSS/MIC 2013
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period27/10/20132/11/2013

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