An Investigation into the Benefits of Time of Flight PET Imaging through Simulation and Measurement with Phantoms and Attenuation Artifacts

Abstract

PET attenuation artifacts due to incorrect attenuation correction maps are a relevant clinical problem that existing procedures to account for motion or co-registration do not fully solve. Previous attempts to correlate the effect of time resolution on the mitigation of these attenuation artifacts do not include data from current cutting edge clinical scanners, whose time of flight (TOF) resolution is as low as 214 ps. In this work, we quantitatively evaluate the effect of TOF resolution on reconstructed images with varying sizes of attenuation artifacts by working with simulated data, and experimental data from current clinical PET scanners. Both of these datasets strongly correlate the TOF resolution and the mitigation of attenuation artifacts, as well as agree quantitatively with each other. Finally, the potential use of this correlation as an independent measure of TOF resolution is discussed.