Segmental acquisition method for stationary objects in (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography tests

We investigated whether images of stationary objects obtained by segmental acquisition with positron emission tomography using 2-deoxy-2-[(18)F]-fluoro-D: -glucose (FDG-PET) are of a quality equivalent to those obtained by conventional continuous acquisition.

Phantoms filled with FDG and mid-abdominal regions of 18 patients who underwent FDG-PET tests were imaged by both continuous and segmental acquisition methods. The total acquisition time was set to 3 min; in the segmental acquisition mode, imaging for 15 s was repeated 12 times. Segmental images (SIs) obtained by superimposition of the reconstructed images were compared quantitatively and visually with continuous images (CIs).

In all the phantom and clinical studies, SIs were never worse than CIs. The variances of the background counts of SIs were 9.8% and 13.0% less those of CIs in phantom and clinical studies, respectively. Visual assessments showed that SIs provided better detection of hot areas and superior image quality when compared to CIs.

For stationary objects, the quality of images obtained by the segmental method is equivalent to that of images obtained conventionally by continuous acquisition. Moreover, under some conditions SIs provide better results than CIs.