First Results on Patients and Phantoms of a Fully Integrated Clinical Whole-Body PET/MRI

2011

Talk

ei

First clinical fully integrated whole-body PET/MR scanners are just entering the field. Here, we present studies toward quantification accuracy and variation within the PET field of view of small lesions from our BrainPET/MRI, a dedicated clinical brain scanner which was installed three years ago in Tbingen. Also, we present first results for patient and phantom scans of a fully integral whole-body PET/MRI, which was installed two months ago at our department. The quantification accuracy and homogeneity of the BrainPET-Insert (Siemens Medical Solutions, Germany) installed inside the magnet bore of a clinical 3T MRI scanner (Magnetom TIM Trio, Siemens Medical Solutions, Germany) was evaluated by using eight hollow spheres with inner diameters from 3.95 to 7.86 mm placed at different positions inside a homogeneous cylinder phantom with an 9:1 and 6:1 sphere to background ratio. The quantification accuracy for small lesions at different positions in the PET FoV shows a standard deviation of up to 11% and is acceptable for quantitative brain studies where the homogeneity of quantification on the entire FoV is essental. Image quality and resolution of the new Siemens whole-body PET/MR system (Biograph mMR, Siemens Medical Solutions, Germany) was evaluated according to the NEMA NU2 2007 protocol using a body phantom containing six spheres with inner diameter from 10 to 37 mm at sphere to background ratios of 8:1 and 4:1 and the F-18 point sources located at different positions inside the PET FoV, respectively. The evaluation of the whole-body PET/MR system reveals a good PET image quality and resolution comparable to state-of-the-art clinical PET/CT scanners. First images of patient studies carried out at the whole-body PET/MR are presented highlighting the potency of combined PET/MR imaging.

@talk{SchmidtSBKMKLSBPP2011,
  title = {First Results on Patients and Phantoms of a Fully Integrated Clinical Whole-Body PET/MRI},
  author = {Schmidt, H. and Schwenzer, N. and Bezrukov, I. and Kolb, A. and Mantlik, F. and Kupferschl{\"a}ger, J. and Lois, C. and Sauter, A. and Brendle, C. and Pfannenberg, C. and Pichler, BJ.},
  volume = {2011},
  number = {J2-8},
  institution = {Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen},
  month = oct,
  year = {2011},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {10}
}