Data driven surrogate signal extraction for dynamic PET using selective PCA: time windows versus the combination of components.

Respiratory motion correction is beneficial in positron emission tomography (PET), as it can reduce artefacts caused by motion and improve quantitative accuracy. Methods of motion correction are commonly based on a respiratory trace obtained through an external device (like the real time position management system) or a data driven method, such as those based on dimensionality reduction techniques (for instance principal component analysis (PCA)). PCA itself being a linear transformation to the axis of greatest variation.

Consensus Recommendations on the Use of F-FDG PET/CT in Lung Disease.

PET with F-FDG has been increasingly applied, predominantly in the research setting, to study drug effects and pulmonary biology and to monitor disease progression and treatment outcomes in lung diseases that interfere with gas exchange through alterations of the pulmonary parenchyma, airways, or vasculature. To date, however, there are no widely accepted standard acquisition protocols or imaging data analysis methods for pulmonary F-FDG PET/CT in these diseases, resulting in disparate approaches. Hence, comparison of data across the literature is challenging.

Use of non-Gaussian time-of-flight kernels for image reconstruction of Monte Carlo simulated data of ultra-fast PET scanners.

Introduction: Time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) scanners can provide significant benefits by improving the noise properties of reconstructed images. In order to achieve this, the timing response of the scanner needs to be modelled as part of the reconstruction process. This is currently achieved using Gaussian TOF kernels.

Effect of attenuation mismatches in time of flight PET reconstruction.

While the pursuit of better time resolution in positron emission tomography (PET) is rapidly evolving, little work has been performed on time of flight (TOF) image quality at high time resolution in the presence of modelling inconsistencies. This works focuses on the effect of using the wrong attenuation map in the system model, causing perturbations in the reconstructed radioactivity image. Previous work has usually considered the effects to be local to the area where there is attenuation mismatch, and has shown that the quantification errors in this area tend to reduce with improved time resolution.

PET image reconstruction using physical and mathematical modelling for time of flight PET-MR scanners in the STIR library.

This work demonstrates how computational and physical modelling of the positron emission tomography (PET) image acquisition process for a state-of-the-art integrated PET and magnetic resonance imaging (PET-MR) system can produce images comparable to the manufacturer. The GE SIGNA PET/MR scanner is manufactured by General Electric and has time-of-flight (TOF) capabilities of about 390 ps. All software development took place in the Software for Tomographic Image Reconstruction (STIR: http://stir.

Effect of positron range on PET quantification in diseased and normal lungs.

The impact of positron range on PET image reconstruction has often been investigated as a blurring effect that can be partly corrected by adding an element to the PET system matrix in the reconstruction, usually based on a Gaussian kernel constructed from the attenuation values. However, the physics involved in PET is more complex. In regions where density does not vary, positron range indeed involves mainly blurring.

Implementation and validation of time-of-flight PET image reconstruction module for listmode and sinogram projection data in the STIR library.

In this paper, we describe the implementation of support for time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) for both listmode and sinogram data in the open source software for tomographic image reconstruction (STIR). We provide validation and performance characterization using simulated data from the open source GATE Monte Carlo toolbox, with TOF configurations spanning from 81.2 to 209.