Impact of acquisition geometry, image processing, and patient size on lesion detection in whole-body 18F-FDG PET

The aim of this work was to develop a rigorous evaluation methodology to assess performance of different acquisition and processing methods for variable patient sizes in the context of lesion detection in whole-body (18)F-FDG PET.

Fifty-nine bed positions were acquired in 32 patients in 2-dimensional (2D) and 3-dimensional (3D) modes 1-4 h after (18)F-FDG injection (740 MBq) using a BGO PET scanner. Three spheres (1.0-, 1.3-, and 1.6-cm diameter) containing (68)Ge were also imaged separately in air, at locations corresponding to possible lesion sites in 2D and 3D (590 targets per condition). Each bed position was acquired for 7 min in 2D and 6 min in 3D and corrected for randoms using delayed window randoms subtraction (DWS) or randoms variance reduction (RVR). Sphere sinograms were attenuated using the 2D or 3D attenuation map derived from the transmission scan of the patient, after scaling 2D and 3D sinograms with identical factors to ensure marginal detectability. Resulting 2D sinograms were reconstructed with filtered backprojection (FBP) and ordered-subsets expectation maximization (OSEM) without any scatter or attenuation correction (FBP-NATS and OSEM-NATS) or corrected for scatter and attenuation and reconstructed using FBP (FBP-ATT) or attenuation-weighted OSEM (AWOSEM). 3D sinograms were processed identically after Fourier rebinning. Next, reconstructed volumes were compared on the basis of performance of a 3-channel Hotelling observer (CHO-SNR [SNR is signal-to-noise ratio]) in detecting the presence of a sphere of unknown size on an anatomic background while modeling observer noise. The noise equivalent count (NEC) rate was computed in 2D and 3D for 3 different phantoms sizes (40, 60, and 95 kg) and compared with lesion detection SNR.

3D imaging yielded better lesion detectability than 2D (P < 0.025, 2-tailed paired t test) in patients of normal size (body mass index [BMI] < or = 31). However, 2D imaging yielded better lesion detectability than 3D in large patients (BMI > 31), as 3D performance deteriorated in large patients (P < 0.05). 2D and 3D yielded similar results for different lesion sizes. CHO-SNR were 40% greater for AWOSEM, FBP-ATT, and FBPNAT than for OSEM (P < 0.05), and AWOSEM yielded significantly better lesion detectability than did FBP. In all patients, RVR yielded a systematic improvement in CHO-SNR over DWS in both 2D and 3D. radicalNEC was characterized by a behavior similar to that of SNR(CHO) for the 3 different phantom sizes considered in this study.