Reduction in Variability of Clinical Lesion Quantification with TOF-PET Imaging

摘要

Time-of-flight (TOF) PET imaging provides several benefits including faster, more uniform convergence, higher contrast at a given noise level, and improved lesion detectability [1-5]. Previous phantom studies have suggested that there may be an additional benefit of TOF, namely a reduction in the variability of the lesion uptake [6]. In this work we investigated the variability in lesion uptake in human data with a complex distribution of activity and attenuation. We studied this effect as a function of the location within the body, the number of collected counts, and the timing resolution.