Radiotherapy treatment planning integrating positron emission tomography (PET) and computerized tomography (CT) is rapidly gaining acceptance in the clinical setting. Although hybrid systems are available, often the planning CT is acquired on a dedicated system separate from the PET scanner. A limiting factor to using PET data becomes the accuracy of the CT/PET registration. In this work, we us...

We have investigated improvements to PET-MR image registration offered by PET-CT scanning. Ten subjects with suspected soft-tissue sarcomas were scanned with an in-line PET-CT and a clinical MR scanner. PET to CT, CT to MR and PET to MR image registrations were performed using a rigid-body external marker technique and rigid and non-rigid voxel-similarity algorithms. PET-MR registration was als...

PURPOSE Multimodality imaging has become an important adjunct of state-of-the-art radiation therapy (RT) treatment planning. Recently, simultaneous PET/MR hybrid imaging has become clinically available and may also contribute to target volume delineation and biological individualization in RT planning. For integration of PET/MR hybrid imaging into RT treatment planning, compatible dedicated RT ...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to describe a clinical relation of noise equivalent count rate (NECR) - an objective measurement of positron emission tomography (PET) systems - measured in a large number of patients, to clinical image quality of PET and their relation to 18F-fluoro-2-deoxyglucose (FDG) activity and patient's weight. METHODS A total of 71 consecutive patients were eval...

BACKGROUND After yttrium-90 ((90)Y) microsphere radioembolization (RE), evaluation of extrahepatic activity and liver dosimetry is typically performed on (90)Y Bremsstrahlung SPECT images. Since these images demonstrate a low quantitative accuracy, (90)Y PET has been suggested as an alternative. The aim of this study is to quantitatively compare SPECT and state-of-the-art PET on the ability to ...

Integrated PET/MRI systems open exciting possibilities for clinical and research applications. However, compared with PET/CT, PET/MRI is a complex technique resulting in new problems and challenges, especially regarding workflow, scan protocols, and data analysis. This complexity applies in particular to examinations in oncology with partial- or whole-body coverage extending over several bed po...

Considering the high cost of dedicated small-animal positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT), an acceptable alternative in many situations might be clinical PET/CT. However, spatial resolution and image quality are of concern. The utility of clinical PET/CT for small-animal research and image quality improvements from super-resolution (spatial subsampling) were investigated. Na...

AIM The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of 2-deoxy-2-[fluorine-18]fluoro-D-glucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), and software-based image fusion of both modalities in the imaging of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) and Hodgkin's disease (HD). METHODS 77 patients with NHL (n = 58) or HD (n = 19) underwent a FDG PET scan, a contrast-enhanced ...

PET is a medical imaging modality with proven clinical value for disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring. The integration of PET and CT on modern scanners provides a synergy of the two imaging modalities. Through different mathematical algorithms, PET data can be reconstructed into the spatial distribution of the injected radiotracer. With dynamic imaging, kinetic parameters of specific biol...