PET/CT: fundamental principles

Abstract

Positron emission tomography (PET) facilitates the evaluation of metabolic and molecular characteristics of a wide variety of cancers, but is limited in its ability to visualize anatomical structures. Computed tomography (CT) facilitates the evaluation of anatomical structures of cancers, but can not visualize their metabolic and molecular aspects. Therefore, the combination of PET and CT provides the ability to accurately register metabolic and molecular aspects of disease with anatomical findings, adding further information to the diagnosis and staging of tumors. The recent generation of high performance PET/CT scanners combines a state of the art full-ring 3D PET scanner and a high-end 16-slice CT scanner. In PET/CT scanners, a CT examination is used for attenuation correction of PET images rather than standard transmission scanning using superset 68 Ge sources. This reduces the examination time, but metallic objects and contrast agents that alter the CT image quality and quantitative measurements of standardized uptake values (SUV) may lead to artifacts in the PET images. Hybrid PET/CT imaging will be very important in oncological applications in the decades to come, and possibly for use in cancer screening and cardiac imaging.