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The image quality, lesion detectability, and acquisition time of 18F-FDG total-body PET/CT in oncological patients

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European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose was to investigate the effects of short acquisition time on the image quality and the lesion detectability of oncological 18F-FDG total-body PET/CT.

Methods

Nineteen oncological patients (6/13 women/men, age 65.6 ± 9.4 years) underwent total-body PET/CT on uEXPLORER scanner using 3D list mode. The administration of 18F-FDG was weight-based (4.4 MBq/kg). The acquisition time was 900 s, and PET data were reconstructed into 900-, 180-, 120-, 60-, 30-, and 18-s duration groups. The subjective PET image quality was scored using a 5-point scale (5, excellent; 1, poor) in 3 perspectives: overall quality, noise, and lesion conspicuity. The objective image quality was evaluated by SUVmax and standard deviation (SD) of the liver, SUVmax of the tumor, and tumor-to-background ratio (TBR). The lesion detectability was the percentage of identifiable lesions in the groups of 180 to 18 s using the group 900 s as reference.

Results

Our results showed that sufficient and acceptable subjective image quality could be achieved with 60- and 30-s groups, and good image quality scores were given to 180- and 120-s groups without significant difference. For shortened acquisition time, SD was increased, while SUVmax of tumor and TBR remained unchanged. The lesion detectability was decreased with shorter acquisition time, but the detection performance could be maintained until the 60-s group compared with the 900-s group, although the image quality degraded.

Conclusion

The total-body PET/CT can significantly shorten the acquisition time with maintained lesion detectability and image quality.

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Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC10103908), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81471706, and 81671735), Shanghai Science and Technology Project (17511104201), Shanghai Municipal Key Clinical Specialty (shslczdzk03401), and Shanghai Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission Youth Fund of China (20164Y0113).

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Author notes

  1. Yi-Qiu Zhang and Peng-Cheng Hu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Nuclear Medicine, Zhongshan Hospital, 180 Fenglin Rd., Shanghai, China

    Yi-Qiu Zhang, Peng-Cheng Hu, Yu-Shen Gu, Shu-Guang Chen, Hao-Jun Yu, Xiang-Qing Wang, Jun Song & Hong-Cheng Shi

  2. Institute of Nuclear Medicine, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Yi-Qiu Zhang, Peng-Cheng Hu, Yu-Shen Gu, Shu-Guang Chen, Hao-Jun Yu, Xiang-Qing Wang, Jun Song & Hong-Cheng Shi

  3. Shanghai Institute of Medical Imaging, Shanghai, China

    Yi-Qiu Zhang, Peng-Cheng Hu, Yu-Shen Gu, Shu-Guang Chen, Hao-Jun Yu, Xiang-Qing Wang, Jun Song & Hong-Cheng Shi

  4. United Imaging Research, Shanghai, China

    Run-Ze Wu

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  1. Yi-Qiu Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong-Cheng Shi.

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Conflict of interest

Run-Ze Wu is an employee of United Imaging Research. The other authors working with Zhongshan Hospital have full control of the data and declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Zhang, YQ., Hu, PC., Wu, RZ. et al. The image quality, lesion detectability, and acquisition time of 18F-FDG total-body PET/CT in oncological patients. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 47, 2507–2515 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-020-04823-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-020-04823-w

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