UCSF

In the development of new PET/CT systems, image quality assessment is critical. This study evaluated two aspects of system performance on a PET/CT scanner under development: the displacement of the source of radioactivity off the center of the field of view and the reconstruction algorithm employed for the correction of metal artifacts. Uniformity served as the principal property for image quality assessment in both studies. Our findings indicated that the displacement from the center resulted in increased non-uniformity, particularly at the edge, and the activity concentration and standard uptake value inaccuracies worsened with increased degree of displacement. Further, the in-built whole-body metal contrast reconstruction failed to correct for the metal artifact for metal plates with a thickness up to 3cm. These results shed light to the potential improvements of system image quality and provide grounds for future work on performance testing with better clinical representations.