A clinical solution for improving the accuracy of cardiac PET/CT imaging

Learning Objectives To improve quantification of cardiac PET imaging with a clinical utility incorporating average CT in data acquisition and 3D registration in post-processing without any hardware upgrade.

We designed utility to incorporate both average CT (ACT) which matches the temporal resolutions of CT and PET in data acquisition and 3D registration which improves registration of the CT and PET data in post-processing. The manufacturers only offer 3D registration and no ACT on their newer PET/CT scanners, and no 3D registration or no ACT on their older PET/CT scanners. The utility can be implemented on the current platform without any hardware change. Cine CT acquisition is used to produce the ACT data to match with the PET data in temporal resolution. The cine CT data are automatically transferred to the processing workstation. The utility checks for the completion of the data transfer, computes the ACT, and transfers the ACT data to the console for quantification of the cardiac PET data. The whole process is automatic and without any user intervention. We have also designed 3D registration software to improve registration of the CT and PET data. This implementation is most effective on the PET/CT scanners not supported by the manufacturers for registration software such as GE Discover LS, ST and some models of STE. It can also be incorporated with the current GE PET/CT scanners to provide ACT for quantification of the cardiac PET data, which is not supported by GE. This software has been used in several clinical sites. One site was able to scan more than 10 patients a day. ACT takes care of the major misregistration issues in data acquisition, and 3D registration is used only when there is patient motion between the CT and PET scans. Our design improved quantification of the cardiac PET/CT imaging and reduced the false positive rates of cardiac PET imaging (Gould et al, JNM 07 and JNM 08; Johnson et al, Mol. Img. 10). The proposed solution can be implemented on all GE PET/CT scanners without any hardware change, and is most useful for the GE DLS, DST and some models of DSTE