Dedicated PET device for breast PET and MRI/PET correlations

摘要

The rationale for employing Positron Emission Tomography with a F-18 fluoro-deoxyglucose (FDG) labeled tracer in oncologic imaging of breast cancer is based on the observation that many cancers exhibit the well-known Warburg effect, which predicts that cancers should show increased glucose uptake and utilization as compared to normal tissue [1,2]. Based on these considerations, there is a long history and extensive literature describing the results of whole-body PET for imaging breast cancer [3,4]. There are technical limitations associated with the intrinsic spatial resolution of whole-body PET systems, having a reconstructed spatial resolution of 5-7 mm full width at half maximum (FWHM) without smoothing algorithms, and more commonly, reconstructed resolutions of 10-15 mm in FWHM because of added smoothing. These resolution limits can have negative impact on both the qualitative assessment and quantitative accuracy for lesions smaller than approximately 25-30 mm.