A dedicated phantom design for positron emission mammography performance evaluation.

A dedicated phantom design for positron emission mammography performance evaluation. Phys Med Biol. 2020 Jul 21;: Authors: Torres-Urzúa LF, Alva-Sanchez H, Martinez-Davalos A, García-Pérez FO, Peruyero-Rivas RM, Rodriguez-Villafuerte M Abstract A standard protocol for performance evaluation of Positron Emission Mammography (PEM) systems has not yet been established. In this work we propose a methodology based on the design of specific phantoms for this imaging modality with component dimensions in accordance with typical breast lesion sizes together with the adaptation of current international protocols designed for clinical and preclinical PET systems. This methodology was used to evaluate the performance of the Flex Solo II PEM scanner in terms of spatial resolution, uniformity and contrast lesion detectability, recovery coefficients and spill-over ratios. Positron range effects were studied with18F and68Ga, which have very different energy spectra. Our results indicate that in-plane spatial resolution of the system is around 3.0 mm and 4.4 mm for18F and68Ga, respectively. Lesion detectability tests with sphere diameters between 4 and 10 mm confirmed that the PEM system can resolve all the spheres (hot or cold), except the 4 mm diameter cold sphere with68Ga. Percent contrast values for18F lie between 6% - 38% and 34% - 51% for hot- and cold- spheres, respectively; the corresponding intervals for68Ga are lower, 4% - 25% and 32% -...
Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - Category: Physics Authors: Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research