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Improved attenuation correction for freely moving animal brain PET studies using a virtual scanner geometry

Attenuation correction in positron emission tomography brain imaging of freely moving animals can be very challenging since the body of the animal is often within the field of view and introduces a non negligible atten- uating factor that can degrade the quantitative accuracy of the reconstructed images. An attractive approach that avoids the need for a transmission scan involves the generation of the convex hull of the animal’s head based on the reconstructed emission images. However, this approach ignores the potential attenuation introduced by the animal’s body. In this work, we propose a virtual scanner geometry, which moves in synchrony with the animal’s head and discriminates between those events that traverse only the animal’s head (and therefore can be accurately compensated for attenuation) and those that might have also traversed the animal’s body. For each pose a new virtual scanner geometry was defined and therefore a new system matrix was calculated leading to a time-varying system matrix. This new approach was evaluated on phantom data acquired on the microPET Focus 220 scanner using a custom-made rat phantom. Results showed that when the animal’s body is within the FOV and not accounted for during attenuation correction it can lead to bias of up to 10%. On the contrary, at- tenuation correction was more accurate when the virtual scanner was employed leading to improved quantitative estimates (bias <2%), without the need to account for the animal’s body.