Abstract #1775

Joint Estimation of Attenuation and Activity Distributions for Clinical non-TOF FDG Head Patient PET/MR Data Employing MR Prior Information

Thorsten Heußer¹, Christopher M Rank¹, Martin T Freitag², Heinz-Peter Schlemmer², Antonia Dimitrakopoulou-Strauss³, Thomas Beyer⁴, and Marc Kachelrieß¹

¹Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany, ²Department of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany, ³Clinical Cooperation Unit Nuclear Medicine, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany, ⁴Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University Vienna, Vienna, Austria

To improve attenuation correction (AC) and thus PET quantification for PET/MR imaging, we have recently proposed a method to jointly estimate attenuation and activity distributions from the non-TOF PET emission data. Available MR information is used to derive voxel-specific expectations on the attenuation coefficients, favoring the occurrence of pre-selected attenuation values corresponding to air, soft tissue, and bone. We here present first results for clinical non-TOF ¹⁸F-FDG PET/MR data sets of the head region. PET reconstruction was performed using MR-based AC as provided by the vendor, our proposed algorithm, and CT-based AC for comparison.

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