(18)F-FDG PET/CT for early detection of embolism and metastatic infection in patients with infective endocarditis.

Purpose: In the acute setting of endocarditis it is very important to assess both the vegetation itself, as well as potential life-threatening complications, in order to decide whether antibiotic therapy will be sufficient or urgent surgery is indicated. A single whole-body scan investigating inflammatory changes could be very helpful to achieve a swift and efficient assessment.

Methods: In this study we assessed whether (18)F-FDG can be used to detect and localize peripheral embolism or distant infection.

Performance of MAP reconstruction for hot lesion detection in whole-body PET/CT: an evaluation with human and numerical observers.

For positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, different reconstruction methods can be applied, including maximum likelihood (ML ) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) reconstruction. Postsmoothed ML images have approximately position and object independent spatial resolution, which is advantageous for (semi-) quantitative analysis. However, the complex object dependent smoothing obtained with MAP might yield improved noise characteristics, beneficial for lesion detection.