Enhanced definition PET for cardiac imaging.

BACKGROUND

We aimed to determine in phantom and cardiac clinical studies the impact of a new high-resolution PET image reconstruction.

METHODS

A phantom with cardiac insert filled with (18)F, 14 (18)F-FDG viability studies and 15 (82)Rb perfusion studies were acquired on a Siemens Biograph-64 (4-ring). The data were reconstructed with 2D- and 3D-attenuation weighted ordered subsets expectation maximization (AWOSEM), and high-definition reconstruction (HD.PET). We calculated wall/cavity contrast, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), wall thickness, motion/thickening and ejection fraction.

RESULTS

In the phantom study, we found an increase in defect size (up to 26%), contrast (up to 48%) and CNR (1.9) with HD.PET as compared to standard techniques. The contrast increased on HD.PET images compared to 2D- and 3D-AWOSEM for viability (14.0% +/- 4.8%) and perfusion studies (7.3% +/- 4.3%) (P < .05). Average CNR increased with HD.PET by 79.4% +/- 17.1% and 68.8% +/- 3.0% in viability and perfusion studies respectively (all P < .05). Average wall thickness with HD.PET decreased in the phantom study by 1.3 +/- 0.3 mm and the viability studies by 1.9 +/- 0.7 mm but not in the perfusion studies. The functional measurements were not significantly different for any techniques.

CONCLUSIONS

We demonstrated both in phantom and patient cardiac studies that HD.PET improves image contrast, defect definition, and CNR.