Experimental Comparison of Lesion Detectability for Four Fully-3D PET Reconstruction Schemes

• Published in: IEEE transactions on medical imaging 2009-04, Vol.28 (4), p.523-534
• Main Authors: Kadrmas, D.J., Casey, M.E., Black, N.F., Hamill, J.J., Panin, V.Y., Conti, M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Anthropomorphism; Cancer; Data Interpretation, Statistical; Fully-3D PET; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image reconstruction; Imaging phantoms; lesion detection; Lesions; localization receiver operating characteristic (LROC); Medical imaging; Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging; Noise level; observer study; Observer Variation; Performance analysis; Phantoms, Imaging; Positron emission tomography; positron emission tomography (PET); Positron-Emission Tomography - methods; ROC Curve; Whole Body Imaging - methods; Whole-body PET
• ISSN: 0278-0062; 1558-254X
• DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2008.2006520

The objective of this work was to evaluate the lesion detection performance of four fully-3D positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction schemes using experimentally acquired data. A multi-compartment anthropomorphic phantom was set up to mimic whole-body 18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) cancer imaging and scanned 12 times in 3D mode, obtaining count levels typical of noisy clinical scans. Eight of the scans had 26 68 Ge ldquoshell-lessrdquo lesions (6, 8-, 10-, 12-, 16-mm diameter) placed throughout the phantom with various target:background ratios. This provided lesion-present and lesion-absent datasets with known truth appropriate for evaluating lesion detectability by localization receiver operating characteristic (LROC) methods. Four reconstruction schemes were studied: 1) Fourier rebinning (FORE) followed by 2D attenuation-weighted ordered-subsets expectation-maximization, 2) fully-3D AW-OSEM, 3) fully-3D ordinary-Poisson line-of-response (LOR-)OSEM; and 4) fully-3D LOR-OSEM with an accurate point-spread function (PSF) model. Two forms of LROC analysis were performed. First, a channelized nonprewhitened (CNPW) observer was used to optimize processing parameters (number of iterations, post-reconstruction filter) for the human observer study. Human observers then rated each image and selected the most-likely lesion location. The area under the LROC curve ( A LROC ) and the probability of correct localization were used as figures-of-merit. The results of the human observer study found no statistically significant difference between FORE and AW-OSEM3D ( A LROC =0.41 and 0.36, respectively), an increase in lesion detection performance for LOR-OSEM3D ( A LROC =0.45, p =0.076), and additional improvement with the use of the PSF model ( A LROC =0.55, p =0.024). The numerical CNPW observer provided the same rankings among algorithms, but obtained different values of A LROC . These results show improved lesion detection performance for the reconstruction algorithms with more sophisticated statistical and imaging models as compared to the previous-generation algorithms.