PET/CT alignment calibration with a non-radioactive phantom and the intrinsic ¹⁷⁶Lu radiation of PET detector

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Qingyang Wei^a ; Tianyu Ma^b ; Shi Wang^b ; Yaqiang Liu^b ; Yu Gu^a ; ^{guyu@ustb.edu.cn" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Tiantian Dai^c ; ^{maxinedtt@163.com" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author}
• 关键词：PET/CT ; Alignment calibration ; Intrinsic Lu-176 radiation ; Random coincidence
• 刊名：Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：1 November 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：835
• 期：Complete
• 页码：163-168
• 全文大小：1718 K

文摘

Positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) is an important tool for clinical studies and pre-clinical researches which provides both functional and anatomical images. To achieve high quality co-registered PET/CT images, alignment calibration of PET and CT scanner is a critical procedure. The existing methods reported use positron source phantoms imaged both by PET and CT scanner and then derive the transformation matrix from the reconstructed images of the two modalities. In this paper, a novel PET/CT alignment calibration method with a non-radioactive phantom and the intrinsic ¹⁷⁶Lu radiation of the PET detector was developed. Firstly, a multi-tungsten-alloy-sphere phantom without positron source was designed and imaged by CT and the PET scanner using intrinsic ¹⁷⁶Lu radiation included in LYSO. Secondly, the centroids of the spheres were derived and matched by an automatic program. Lastly, the rotation matrix and the translation vector were calculated by least-square fitting of the centroid data. The proposed method was employed in an animal PET/CT system (InliView-3000) developed in our lab. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieves high accuracy and is feasible to replace the conventional positron source based methods.