%0 Journal Article
%T A method for model-free partial volume correction in oncological PET
%A Frank Hofheinz
%A Jens Langner
%A Jan Petr
%A Bettina Beuthien-Baumann
%A Liane Oehme
%A J£¿rg Steinbach
%A J£¿rg Kotzerke
%A J£¿rg van den Hoff
%J EJNMMI Research
%D 2012
%I Springer
%R 10.1186/2191-219x-2-16
%X The algorithm proceeds in two automated steps. Step 1: estimation of the actual object boundary with a threshold based method and determination of the total activity A measured within the enclosed volume V. Step 2: determination of the activity fraction B, which is measured outside the object due to the partial volume effect (spill-out). The PVE corrected mean value is then given by Cmean = (A+B)/V. For validation simulated tumours were used which were derived from real patient data (liver metastases of a colorectal carcinoma and head and neck cancer, respectively). The simulated tumours have characteristics (regarding tumour shape, contrast, noise, etc.) which are very similar to those of the underlying patient data, but the boundaries and tracer accumulation are exactly known. The PVE corrected mean values of 37 simulated tumours were determined and compared with the true mean values.For the investigated simulated data the proposed approach yields PVE corrected mean values which agree very well with the true values (mean deviation (¡À s.d.): (£¿0.8¡À2.5)%).The described method enables accurate quantitative partial volume correction in oncological hot spot imaging.In recent years PET has become more and more important for therapy response assessment in oncology. In this context quantitation has been mostly restricted to assessment of changes of the maximum standardised uptake value (SUVmax) of lesions during therapy [1], but there are also attempts to correlate the SUVmean of lesions with therapy outcome, which might be a more representative parameter especially for lesions with heterogeneous tracer accumulation (see e.g. [2,3]). However, the limited spatial resolution of PET leads to partial volume effects PVE and, consequently, to limited signal recovery for, both, SUVmax and SUVmean. While SUVmax is affected only for small structures (whose size is comparable to ¨C or smaller than ¨C the given spatial resolution), SUVmean is compromised even at target sizes much larg
%K Partial volume effect
%K Partial volume correction
%K Recovery correction
%K PET
%K Quantification
%U http://www.ejnmmires.com/content/2/1/16