PET calibrations with varying coincidence windows

Abstract

When calibrating a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, a radioactive calibration phantom is scanned over a period of several half lives to acquire a plurality of frames of scan data. Interlaced timing windows are employed to facilitate acquiring coincidence data for a plurality of coincidence timing windows and energy windows during a single calibration scan. Coincident events are binned according to each of a plurality of selected coincidence windows, and the PET scanner is calibrated for each of the plurality of coincidence timing windows using data acquired from the single calibration scan.

Description

technical field [0001] This application is particularly applicable to positron emission tomography (PET) systems, and in particular relates to PET scanner calibration. However, it will be appreciated that the described techniques may also find application in other medical imaging device calibration systems, other calibration scenarios, or other scanner calibration techniques. Background technique [0002] As described in US Patent No. 7718954, a typical PET scanner performs a normalization calibration to correct for non-uniform 3D detector response, which typically takes about 6 hours. In addition, this scanner is calibrated with Standard Uptake Values ​​(SUV), which provides the conversion of counts in images to radioactive concentrations. The calibration used a decaying F-18 source and could have taken 11 hours or more to complete. [0003] Any event measured by the PET scanner and occurring within a concurrent time window (e.g., 6ns), even two random single events, was ...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Each calibration procedure is very time consuming, typically taking 11-14 hours or more for each concurrency window

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