Study on CT Metal Artifact Correction and its Effect on PET Quantitation

• Main Authors: Hou Ting Yang, 楊鶴廷
• Other Authors: I. T. Hsiao
• Format: Others
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70184105625215635154

碩士 === 長庚大學 === 醫學物理暨影像科學研究所 === 97 === The combination of positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET/CT) has become an effective tool in many clinical imaging applications recently, in particular, for diagnosis, staging, and restaging of the various cancers. CT was mainly used for attenuation correction in PET. One of the major problems with CT is metal artifacts with image distortion caused by the metal objects of high attenuation. The artifacts seriously degrade CT image quality, particularly for those regions near the metal surfaces. These artifacts may cause errors when using CT for the spatial localization of PET findings, and may degrade the PET quantitation through the CT-based attenuation correction. In this study, we propose two post-processing methods for metal artifact correction: post-processing interpolation method and Mask-based method. In addition to evaluate the metal-artifact-corrected CT images by two post-processing methods, we also evaluated the impact of these approaches on the quantification of PET images. The results showed that the proposed post-processing methods were easy to use, and with reduced 4% errors in the PET quantitation than the conventional methods. Future work will include more clinical data validation, and improvement of the proposed mask-based methods.