MRI data driven partial volume effects correction in PET imaging using 3D local multi-resolution analysis

PET partial volume effects (PVE) resulting from the limited resolution of PET scanners is still a quantitative issue that PET/MRI scanners do not solve by themselves. A recently proposed voxel-based locally adaptive 3D multi-resolution PVE correction based on the mutual analysis of wavelet decompositions was applied on 12 clinical 18F-FLT PET/T1 MRI images of glial tumors, and compared to a PET only voxel-wise iterative deconvolution approach. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrated the interest of exploiting PET/MRI information with higher uptake increases (19±8% vs. 11±7%, p=0.02), as well as more convincing visual restoration of details within tumors with respect to deconvolution of the PET uptake only. Further studies are now required to demonstrate the accuracy of this restoration with histopathological validation of the uptake in tumors.