A phantom for investigation of tumour signal and noise in PET reconstruction with various smoothing filters: experiments and comparisons with simulated intensity diffusion.

An abdomen phantom, containing an idealised fillable liver volume was developed. A fast settling gel was used to produce a row of simulated tumours as well as normal surrounding tissue, each of these components containing different concentrations of (18)F-FDG. The magnitude of the signal above normal tissue intensity as well as the noise was obtained after reconstructions with Ordered Subset expectation-maximization (OSEM) and various Gaussian smoothing filters. Signals derived by 'simulated intensity diffusion' agreed well with experimental results.