New PET Offers Improved Imaging and Reconstruction Technology

New positron emission tomography (PET) image reconstruction technology has been designed to provide better image quality, reduced acquisition time, and lower injected agent dose. Current PET iterative reconstruction technologies, such as time-of-flight (TOF) and ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM), are not able to control noise when the number of iterations increases, which leads to a trade-off of quantitative accuracy in favor of image quality.

When determining if a specific cancer treatment is effective, clinicians not only want to identify the smallest of lesions, but also the capability of determining earlier whether the metabolic activity is being mitigated under current treatment. For accurate treatment response evaluation, a clinician requires accurate quantitative applications. GE Healthcare’s GE Healthcare (Chalfont St. Giles, UK) Q.Suite tools demonstrate the importance of eliminating variability such as respiratory motion. Q.Suite enables clinicians to evaluate treatment response more accurately than ever before, enabling them to effectively assess biologic changes in a patient during course of treatment.

GE Healthcare presented the Q.Suite T Imaging and Reconstruction tools at the 2013 European Association of Nuclear Medicine Congress (EANM), held October 2013 in Lyon (France). GE Healthcare’s interactive educational experience on PET regularized reconstruction technology presented at the Congress showed what is possible when forcing a choice between image quality or quantitation accuracy is no longer necessary.

PET regularized reconstruction technology that was displayed at EANM interactively shows the potential of full convergence PET imaging. “We know that cancer patients don’t always respond to their initial course of treatment,” said Steve Gray, president and CEO of GE Healthcare’s MICT (multiple image computed tomography) business. “If we can give clinicians a more accurate, reliable, and faster tool to confirm that a change in treatment is needed, the patient will benefit greatly. For example, PET/CT can help clinicians determine whether chemotherapy is working after as few as one to two cycles, saving patient’s unnecessary procedures and a significant amount of money.”

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