Breast PET passes tech evaluation with flying colors
Dedicated breast PET appears to be performing up to industry standards according to encouraging results from a study evaluating the emerging technology published May 8 in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
Kanae K. Miyake, MD, from the department of diagnostic imaging and nuclear medicine, Kyoto University Hospital, Kyoto, Japan, and colleagues assessed the spatial resolution, sensitivity, counting rate capabilities and image quality of the technology according to National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) NU 4-2008 benchmarks.
The system is built with a detector ring with a 185-millimeter aperture and 155.5 millimeter axial view. There are 4 layers of 32 x 32 lutetium crystal array and a 64-channel position-sensitive photomultiplier tube. The crystal element is 1.44 x 1.44 x 4.5 millimeters.
“The dedicated breast PET scanner has excellent spatial resolution and high sensitivity,” wrote Miyake et al. “The performance of the dedicated breast PET scanner is considered to be reasonable enough to support its use in breast cancer imaging.”
Axial spatial resolution was about 2.0 millimeters, radial and tangential were gauged at 1.6 and 1.7 millimeters, respectively. Dynamic row-action maximum-likelihood algorithm reconstruction reached a 0.8-millimeter resolution across the board.
The researchers saw a peak sensitivity of 11.2 percent and a scatter fraction of 30.1 percent using a rodent phantom. Imaging in humans yielded high quality and contrast images with limited background noise.