Continuous Bed Motion Acquisition with Axially Short Phantom for System Setup and Quality Control

Abstract

The use of a relatively bulky and heavy phantom may be not an optimal option in the clinical environment. As scanner length becomes increasingly longer in an attempt to gain sensitivity, an axially short (relative to the scanner axial FOV) phantom may be the only available option for the system setup.The development of Continuous Bed Motion (CBM) acquisition opens the possibility to use axially short, structurally complicated, and light phantoms for system setup. From list mode data, two data sets are generated; in one, case motion is integrated into the data construction process. In the second case, it is ignored. Through the use of two complimentary data sets, the simultaneous reconstruction of activity and estimation of detector properties is achievable. With the use of CBM reconstruction, there is no need to make assumptions in modeling stationary, motion ignored, projection data.In the present work we concentrate on time alignment setup and crystal efficiency normalization component estimation along with introduction of the axially short phantom. The presented Siemens Vision investigations show that the CBM calibration procedures using a short phantom produced practically identical corrections compared to those of the standard, stationary, long phantom acquisition.