Po-topic III-07: Evaluating image quality for whole-body pet imaging

Abstract

This work presents initial results from observer detection performance studies of image quality using the same volume visualization software tools that are used for whole-body imaging with positron emission tomography (PET). With the rapidly increasing use of PET for cancer detection and staging, unanswered questions about the impact of the choice of acquisition, processing, and reconstruction parameters on image quality are becoming more important. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) detection studies of image quality typically use a planar display methodology, where a transaxial 2D image is displayed, possibly flanked by adjacent image planes (multi-slice). This is reasonable for CT or MRI image analysis, where image sets often consist of noncontiguous image planes. In PET, however, the images intrinsically form a contiguous volume, and most, if not all, clinical PET centers use a “volumetric” display of image data to assess whole-body PET images. A volumetric display is one that displays three orthogonal planar sections (transaxial, sagittal, and coronal) through an image volume.