Regularized ML reconstruction for time/dose reduction in (18)F-fluoride PET/CT studies.

Area of Science:

• Nuclear Medicine
• Medical Imaging
• Radiology

Background:

• Whole-body (18)F-fluoride PET/CT is crucial for detecting bone lesions.
• Current protocols often require long acquisition times (3 min/bed).
• Reducing scan time or injected dose is desirable for patient comfort and efficiency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a regularized reconstruction strategy for (18)F-fluoride PET imaging.
• To enable detection of bone lesions using shorter acquisition times (1 min/bed).
• To leverage anatomical information from co-registered CT images during PET reconstruction.

Main Methods:

• Proposed a regularized reconstruction strategy incorporating anatomical CT data.
• Defined bone and non-bone voxels using CT information transposed to the PET framework.
• Applied distinct priors: relative difference prior for bone and P-Gaussian prior for non-bone voxels.
• Tested the strategy on 6 (18)F-fluoride PET/CT studies involving 67 lesions.

Main Results:

• Regularized reconstruction yielded results comparable to standard 3 min/bed imaging.
• Evaluated metrics included image quality, lesion activity, noise level, and noise correlation.
• The 1 min/bed strategy demonstrated efficacy in bone lesion detection.

Conclusions:

• The proposed regularized reconstruction strategy is effective for (18)F-fluoride PET bone lesion detection.
• It allows for reduced acquisition time or injected dose while maintaining diagnostic quality.
• This method offers a valuable tool for optimizing (18)F-fluoride PET/CT protocols.