Abstract #3090

MRI Attenuated Whole Body PET Reconstruction: An in Vivo Study Using Animal Subjects

Jeffrey Steinberg¹, Guang Jia², Steffen Sammet², Jun Zhang², Nathan Hall², Michael V. Knopp²

¹Department of Radiology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; ²Department of Radiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

In this paper we compared MRI-based attenuation correction methods for MRI/PET hybrid scanners to CT attenuated PET images acquired in a PET/CT scanner. The MRI-based attenuation maps were acquired by segmentation of the MRI into regions of air, lung, tissue, and bone. These segmented maps were assigned the corresponding attenuation values and were used for reconstruction. The resulting PET images were nearly identical to the CT attenuated PET images, indicating that using an approximation yields acceptable results for most clinical purposes.