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Quality control for multi-modality hybrid cameras using 3D phantom

¹ Nuclear Medicine, Walter Reed Army Med Ctr, Washington, District of Columbia

2242

Objectives: A multi-modality hybrid camera system has become a more important tool in medical diagnosis than ever. Because it combines two modalities into one system, such as PET/CT or SPECT/CT, regular quality controls (QC) must be done for each modality separately. In addition, an extra QC step, alignment QC, is needed to insure the two modalities are properly aligned in order to fuse the images seamlessly. This work presents a simple but unique approach to establish this goal.

Methods: A phantom was designed for the alignment QC. It consist a sectional body simulated phantom with six identical cylindrical sources inserted at different positions. The sources were 15 mm in diameter and 60 mm in length. Each source was filled with either liquid F-18 for testing PET/CT or Tc-99m for testing SPECT/CT. The sources were positioned such that two each were parallel to each other in one of the dimensional planes but vertical to the others. One source was positioned at the center along the axial direction while all of the remaining sources were positioned off center. The phantom was scanned on a SPECT/CT camera using a typical SPECT/CT protocol, while for a PET/CT camera, two-bed scanning using an abdomen protocol was used to test the bed translation alignment.

Results: After the scan, the images of both emission images and CT images were fused and reprojected in transverse, coronal and sagittal planes. Any observed misalignment would be recorded on a camera QC log and reported to the service technician for adjustment.

Conclusions: The proposed QC here can serve two purposes: 1). A three-dimensional alignment check; 2). translation alignment check for the multi-bed position scan. The steps are simple and could be easily adapted in a routine QC protocol for a PET/CT and SPECT/CT.

This Article Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Perkins, A. Articles by Cranston, T. PubMed Articles by Perkins, A. Articles by Cranston, T.