Background: We aimed to determine in phantom and cardiac clinical studies the impact of a new high-resolution PET image reconstruction.
Methods: A phantom with cardiac insert filled with (18)F, 14 (18)F-FDG viability studies and 15 (82)Rb perfusion studies were acquired on a Siemens Biograph-64 (4-ring). The data were reconstructed with 2D- and 3D-attenuation weighted ordered subsets expectation maximization (AWOSEM), and high-definition reconstruction (HD.PET). We calculated wall/cavity contrast, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), wall thickness, motion/thickening and ejection fraction.
Results: In the phantom study, we found an increase in defect size (up to 26%), contrast (up to 48%) and CNR (1.9) with HD.PET as compared to standard techniques. The contrast increased on HD.PET images compared to 2D- and 3D-AWOSEM for viability (14.0% +/- 4.8%) and perfusion studies (7.3% +/- 4.3%) (P < .05). Average CNR increased with HD.PET by 79.4% +/- 17.1% and 68.8% +/- 3.0% in viability and perfusion studies respectively (all P < .05). Average wall thickness with HD.PET decreased in the phantom study by 1.3 +/- 0.3 mm and the viability studies by 1.9 +/- 0.7 mm but not in the perfusion studies. The functional measurements were not significantly different for any techniques.
Conclusions: We demonstrated both in phantom and patient cardiac studies that HD.PET improves image contrast, defect definition, and CNR.