Clinical Performance Comparison of a Long Versus a Short Axial Field-of-View PET/CT Using EARL-Compliant Reconstructions.

Roya, Mostafa; van Snick, Johannes H.; Slart, Riemer H. J. A.; Noordzij, Walter; Stormezand, Gilles N.; Willemsen, Antoon T. M.; Boellaard, Ronald; Glaudemans, Andor W. J. M.; Tsoumpas, Charalampos; van Sluis, Joyce

Purpose: To ensure comparable PET/CT image quality between or within centres, clinical inter-system performance comparisons following European Association of Nuclear Medicine Research Ltd. (EARL) guidelines is required. In this work the performance of the long axial field-of-view Biograph Vision Quadra is compared to its predecessor, the short axial field-of-view Biograph Vision. Procedures: To this aim, patients with suspected tumour lesions received a single weight-based (3 MBq/kg) 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose injection and underwent routine clinical (∼ 15 min) scans on the Vision and 3-min scans on the Quadra in listmode in balanced order. Image quality (IQ), image noise (IN), and tumour demarcation (TD) were assessed visually by four nuclear medicine physicians using a 5-point Likert scale and semiquantitative analysis was performed using standardised uptake values (SUVs). Inter-reader agreement was tested using Wilcoxon's signed rank test and the SUVs were statistically compared using a paired t-test. Results: Twenty patients (mean age, 60 years ± 8.8 [standard deviation], 16 male) were enrolled. Inter-reader agreement ranged from good to very good for IQ and IN (0.62 ≤ W ≤ 0.81), and fair for TD (0.29 ≤ W ≤ 0.39). Furthermore, a significant difference was found for TD (p = 0.015) between the systems, showing improved TD for the Quadra. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that the Quadra can be used in routine clinical practice with multiple PET/CT systems or in multicentre studies. This system provides comparable diagnostic image quality and semiquantitative accuracy, improved TD, and has the advantage of shorter scan durations.

NUCLEAR medicine; NUCLEAR research; LIKERT scale; COMPUTED tomography; JOB performance

Molecular Imaging & Biology, 2024, Vol 26, Issue 5, p780

1536-1632

Academic Journal

10.1007/s11307-024-01939-5