Systematic evaluation of human soft tissue attenuation correction in whole-body PET/MR: Implications from PET/CT for optimization of MR-based AC in patients with normal lung tissue

Background: Attenuation correction (AC) is an important methodical step in positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI) to correct for attenuated and scattered PET photons.Purpose: The overall quality of magnetic resonance (MR)-based AC in whole-body PET/MRI was evaluated in direct comparison to computed tomography (CT)-based AC serving as reference. The quantitative impact of isolated tissue classes in the MR-AC was systematically investigated to identify potential optimization needs and strategies.Methods: Data of n = 60 whole-body PET/CT patients with normal lung tissue and without metal implants/prostheses were used to generate six different AC-models based on the CT data for each patient, simulating variations of MR-AC. The original continuous CT-AC (CT-org) is referred to as reference. A pseudo MR-AC (CT-mrac), generated from CT data, with four tissue classes and a bone atlas represents the MR-AC. Relative difference in linear attenuation coefficients (LAC) and standardized uptake values were calculated. From the results two improvements regarding soft tissue AC and lung AC were proposed and evaluated.Results: The overall performance of MR-AC is in good agreement compared to CT-AC. Lungs, heart, and bone tissue were identified as the regions with most deviation to the CT-AC (myocardium -15%, bone tissue -14%, and lungs +/- 20%). Using single-valued LACs for AC in the lung only provides limited accuracy. For improved soft tissue AC, splitting the combined soft tissue class into muscles and organs each with adapted LAC could reduce the deviations to the CT-AC to < +/- 1%. For improved lung AC, applying a gradient LAC in the lungs could remarkably reduce over- or undercorrections in PET signal compared to CT-AC (+/- 5%).Conclusions: The AC is important to ensure best PET image quality and accurate PET quantification for diagnostics and radiotherapy planning. The optimized segment-based AC proposed in this study, which was evaluated on PET/CT data, inherently reduces quantification bias in normal lung tissue and soft tissue compared to the CT-AC reference.