Small lesion depiction and quantification accuracy of oncological F-FDG PET/CT with small voxel and Bayesian penalized likelihood reconstruction.

Background: To investigate the influence of small voxel Bayesian penalized likelihood (SVB) reconstruction on small lesion detection compared to ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM) reconstruction using a clinical trials network (CTN) chest phantom and the patients with F-FDG-avid small lung tumors, and determine the optimal penalty factor for the lesion depiction and quantification.

Methods: The CTN phantom was filled with F solution with a sphere-to-background ratio of 3.81:1.