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Effect of time‐of‐flight and point spread function modeling on detectability of myocardial defects in PET
Author(s) -
Schaefferkoetter Joshua,
Ouyang Jinsong,
Rakvongthai Yothin,
Nappi Carmela,
El Fakhri Georges
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.4875725
Subject(s) - point spread function , smoothing , algorithm , iterative reconstruction , computer science , artificial intelligence , observer (physics) , kernel (algebra) , optics , physics , mathematics , computer vision , quantum mechanics , combinatorics
Purpose: A study was designed to investigate the impact of time‐of‐flight (TOF) and point spread function (PSF) modeling on the detectability of myocardial defects. Methods: Clinical FDG‐PET data were used to generate populations of defect‐present and defect‐absent images. Defects were incorporated at three contrast levels, and images were reconstructed by ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM) iterative methods including ordinary Poisson, alone and with PSF, TOF, and PSF+TOF. Channelized Hotelling observer signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) was the surrogate for human observer performance. Results: For three iterations, 12 subsets, and no postreconstruction smoothing, TOF improved overall defect detection SNR by 8.6% as compared to its non‐TOF counterpart for all the defect contrasts. Due to the slow convergence of PSF reconstruction, PSF yielded 4.4% less SNR than non‐PSF. For reconstruction parameters (iteration number and postreconstruction smoothing kernel size) optimizing observer SNR, PSF showed larger improvement for faint defects. The combination of TOF and PSF improved mean detection SNR as compared to non‐TOF and non‐PSF counterparts by 3.0% and 3.2%, respectively. Conclusions: For typical reconstruction protocol used in clinical practice, i.e., less than five iterations, TOF improved defect detectability. In contrast, PSF generally yielded less detectability. For large number of iterations, TOF+PSF yields the best observer performance.