October 2024 – Development of a Versatile PET Phantom for Realistic Brain Imaging Simulations
PhD candidate Ekaterina Shanina and her colleagues have introduced a groundbreaking phantom technique for positron emission tomography (PET), enabling the simulation of complex static and dynamic activity distributions from a single PET scan.
Using the uEXPLORER total-body PET/CT scanner and a 22Na point source mounted on a robotic arm, the team collected a high-statistics dataset and subsampled it to create arbitrary activity distributions, such as a simple geometric phantom, a high-resolution FDG brain phantom, and even multiple independent frames of florbetaben distribution, a tracer used to image beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. The technique demonstrated strong quantitative accuracy, with errors under 5% across a range of activity concentrations and tissue types.
Unlike conventional phantoms, this universal method offers unmatched flexibility for evaluating image reconstruction, correction techniques, and PET system performance—particularly for the development of next-generation high-resolution brain PET scanners.
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