US 11,961,164 B2
Continuous bed motion acquisition with axially short phantom for PET imaging system setup and quality control
Vladimir Panin, Knoxville, TN (US); Mehmet Aykac, Knoxville, TN (US); Shikui Yan, Knoxville, TN (US); and Brian Kelly, Knoxville, TN (US)
Assigned to Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Malvern, PA (US)
Appl. No. 17/596,829
Filed by Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Malvern, PA (US)
PCT Filed Sep. 29, 2020, PCT No. PCT/US2020/070589
§ 371(c)(1), (2) Date Dec. 20, 2021,
PCT Pub. No. WO2021/072416, PCT Pub. Date Apr. 15, 2021.
Claims priority of provisional application 62/912,817, filed on Oct. 9, 2019.
Prior Publication US 2022/0309718 A1, Sep. 29, 2022
Int. Cl. G06T 11/00 (2006.01); A61B 6/03 (2006.01); G16H 30/40 (2018.01)
CPC G06T 11/003 (2013.01) [A61B 6/037 (2013.01); G06T 11/006 (2013.01); G16H 30/40 (2018.01)] 11 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method for monitoring a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner performance during a continuous-bed-motion (CBM) acquisition using an axially short phantom to cover long axial PET scanner's field of view, wherein the PET scanner has a patient bed that moves a patient in an axial motion through the PET scanner during the CBM acquisition, the method comprising:
(a) generating time-of-flight (TOF) data of positron annihilation activity in the axially short phantom mounted on the patient bed during the CBM acquisition, while accounting for the axial motion of the patient bed during the CBM acquisition, as a first data set that comprises CBM data y with spatial projection index j=(ρ,θ,ζ), wherein ρ is transaxial radial coordinate, θ is azimuthal coordinate, and TOF bin index T is modeled by combining true events modeled projection p from emission object f, defined by voxel index k, corrected for scanner efficiency through a normalization array n for attenuation by α, and scatter estimation S, corrected for scanner efficiency, and mean random data r according to:

OG Complex Work Unit Math
wherein C is the geometrical projection system matrix;
wherein ε is the crystal efficiency; and
wherein coordinate ζ is the CBM data normalization;
(b) generating a complementary data set by integrating the TOF data over the axial motion of the patient bed during the CBM acquisition, wherein the complementary data set is modeled by the equation:

OG Complex Work Unit Math
wherein z is axial plane coordinate, B is a blurring operator defined as

OG Complex Work Unit Math
and Y ρθz, a motion blurring operator, is calculated by:

OG Complex Work Unit Math
wherein t′acq is CBM acquisition time; and
(c) simultaneously reconstructing the positron annihilation activity and crystal efficiency normalization coefficient from the complementary data set.