Simultaneous PET/MR Hybrid Imaging: MR Based Continuous Valued Attenuation Map Generation and Its Effect on Quantitative PET Imaging

Krishnan Bharath Navalpakkam¹, Harald Braun², Susanne Zeigler², Harald H.Quick², Joachim Hornegger¹, Torsten Kuwert³

MR-based attenuation correction for PET images is till an open issue. An accurate attenuation correction is needed for PET quantification. In this work, we generate a continuous valued CT-like attenuation map from Ultrashort Echo Time and two-point DIXON VIBE sequences using ε-insensitive Support Vector Regression (ε-SVR). Further, we compare the PET quantification accuracy using attenuation maps from a segmented CT and predicted CT with respect to a patient CT as the gold standard. Results show that a continuous estimation of attenuation values outperforms a segmentation based attenuation map.