Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
Normalization in positron emission tomography (PET) is the process of ensuring that all lines of response joining detectors in coincidence have the same effective sensitivity. In three-dimensional (3D) PET, normalization is complicated by the presence of a large proportion of scattered coincidences, and by the fact that cameras operating in 3D mode...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
Modern positron emission tomography (PET) detectors are typically made from 2D modular arrays of scintillation crystals. Their characteristic flood field response (or flood histogram) must be segmented in order to correctly determine the crystal of annihilation photon interaction in the system. Crystal identification information thus generated is a...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
Molecular probes used for in vivo optical fluorescence tomography (OFT) studies in small animals are typically chosen such that their emission spectra lie in the 680-850 nm wavelength range. This is because tissue attenuation in this spectral band is relatively low, allowing optical photons even from deep sites in tissue to reach the animal surface...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
A simple methodology for the manufacture and calibration of polyacrylamide gel (PAG) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) radiation dosimetry is presented to enable individuals to undertake such work in a routine clinical environment. Samples of PAG were irradiated using a linear accelerator and imaged using a 0.5 T (22 MHz) Philips Gyroscan MRI sc...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
The axial field of view (AFOV) of the current generation of clinical whole-body PET scanners range from 15-22 cm, which limits sensitivity and renders applications such as whole-body dynamic imaging or imaging of very low activities in whole-body cellular tracking studies, almost impossible. Generally, extending the AFOV significantly increases the...
Published in Physics in medicine and biology
We present a method based on spectral theory for the shape analysis of carpal bones of the human wrist. We represent the cortical surface of the carpal bone in a coordinate system based on the eigensystem of the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation. We employ a metric--global point signature (GPS)--that exploits the scale and isometric invariance of ...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
Detecting cancerous lesions is a major clinical application in emission tomography. In previous work, we have studied penalized maximum-likelihood (PML) image reconstruction for the detection task and proposed a method to design a shift-invariant quadratic penalty function to maximize detectability of a lesion at a known location in a two dimension...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
We have used noise-equivalent count (NEC) rates to optimize count rate performance for 3D acquisition in PET in a wide range of situations, with particular reference to imaging of the torso. We have also compared NEC performance for 2D and 3D acquisition in order to establish the conditions under which 3D mode offers an improvement over 2D mode. Me...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
Normalization coefficients in three-dimensional positron emission tomography (3D PET) are affected by parameters such as camera geometry and the design and arrangement of the block detectors. In this work, normalization components for three whole-body 3D-capable tomographs (the GE Advance, the Siemens/CTI962/HR+ and the Siemens/CTI951R) are compare...
Published in Physics in Medicine and Biology
In positron emission tomography (PET), random coincidence events must be removed from the measured signal in order to obtain quantitatively accurate data. The most widely implemented technique for estimating the number of random coincidences on a particular line of response is the delayed coincidence channel method. Estimates obtained in this way a...
