[Evaluation of partial volume effect in quantitative measurement of regional cerebral blood flow using positron...

Effects of limited spatial resolution of the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner on the quantitative measurement of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was investigated for various tracer kinetic models with use of 15O labeled water and PET. Using a numerical brain phantom consisting of a gray matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid components, dynamical tracer distribution images were calculated for the H215O bolus injection and for the C15O2 gas inhalation protocols. The tracer distribution images were convoluted with a 2 dimensional gaussian function with full-width at half maximum (FWHM) of 4, 7, 12 mm to simulate a limited spatial resolution of the PET scanner, and rCBF images were calculated according to some kinetic models. Smoothing the tracer distribution images caused a heterogeneous structure (tissue mixture) in a given volume element. rCBF values calculated by models with use of 15O-water and PET were found to provide rCBF values that were systematically underestimated compared with those obtained by the microsphere model for a mixed tissue region. Moreover, the magnitude of the underestimation was shown to be highly dependent on the tracer kinetic models employed, those errors for mixed tissue of gray and white matter were 20% on steady state, 9% on autoradiography and on weighted integration method, and 2% on non-linear least squares fitting, compared with microsphere model. More errors observed by steady state method and autoradiography method happened for tissue mixture consisting gray matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid components. It is important to take into account for difference of the partial volume effect for each models in calculated rCBF.