Effect of patient thickness and scan duration on lesion detectability in PET oncology imaging

A dominant component of image quality for whole-body positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is attenuation, which is determined by patient thickness. This can be partially compensated for by adjusting scan duration. We evaluate the effect of changes in patient thickness and scan duration on lesion detection with model observers. We simulated 2D PET acquisitions of an anthropomorphic phantom with spherical target lesions. Three different anthropomorphic phantoms were used, with effective abdominal diameters of 20 cm, 27 cm, and 35 cm. The diameters of the lesions were varied from 1.0 to 3.0 cm, and the contrast ratios of the lesions were varied from 1.5 to 4.0. Noise-free scans were simulated with an analytical simulator. Poisson noise was added to simulate scan durations ranging from 1 to 10 minutes per bed position, using noise equivalent count rates previously measured using a modified NEMA NU2 countrate phantom. The average detectability of each target lesion under each condition was calculated using a nonprewhitening matched filter from 25 noisy realizations for each combination of parameters. Our results demonstrate the variation of the minimum scan duration required to detect a target of a given size and contrast ratio, for any fixed threshold of detectability. For image quality to remain constant for patients with larger cross-sectional areas, acquisition times should be increased accordingly, although in some cases this may not be possible due to practical constraints.