A method for calibrating the CT-based attenuation correction of PET in human tissue

The use of x-ray computed tomography (CT)-based attenuation correction for positron emission tomography (PET) in PET/CT systems requires the transformation of CT Hounsfield units (HU) to linear attenuation coefficients at 511 keV (LAC/sub 511/). This cannot be done perfectly from a single peak kilov...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on nuclear science 2006-02, Vol.53 (1), p.102-107
Main Authors: Watson, C.C., Rappoport, V., Faul, D., Townsend, D.W., Carney, J.P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Approximation
Attenuation
Attenuation coefficients
Attenuation correction
Biological materials
Calibration
Computed tomography
human tissue
Human tissues
Humans
linear attenuation coefficient
Los Angeles Council
Particle scattering
PET
PET/CT
Piecewise linear approximation
Polyethylene terephthalates
Positron emission tomography
Rayleigh scattering
Tomography
Transformations
X-ray imaging
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Summary:The use of x-ray computed tomography (CT)-based attenuation correction for positron emission tomography (PET) in PET/CT systems requires the transformation of CT Hounsfield units (HU) to linear attenuation coefficients at 511 keV (LAC/sub 511/). This cannot be done perfectly from a single peak kilovolt (kVp) CT scan due to variability in Compton and photoelectric composition and, thus, an approximate transformation must be employed. One difficulty in this lies in accurately determining the linear attenuation coefficients (LAC) in actual human tissue. Typically, phantoms consisting of synthetic materials thought to be approximate human tissue equivalents are employed instead. A potentially more accurate approach would be to use dual kVp CT scans to estimate LAC/sub 511/ in actual human tissue and then base the single kVp transformation on these data. This approach would also permit an assessment of the dispersion of actual tissue values about the two-component trend lines typically used for the single kVp transformation. In this paper, we develop and assess this methodology.
ISSN:0018-9499
1558-1578
DOI:10.1109/TNS.2005.862972