Evaluation of clinical PET count rate performance

We propose a new methodology for analyzing clinical positron emission tomography (PET) count rate performance that involves matching net trues (prompts - delayeds) and randoms (delayeds) count rate responses measured on a reference phantom to the actual patient data. We employ these estimated response curves to compute a performance metric closely related to the noise equivalent count rate, as a function of the total singles event rate in the system. From this we can determine the peak performance value relative to the measured performance for any individual acquisition. This maximum performance value depends only on the emitter and attenuator distributions. These peak count rates can be used to derive frame durations for equivalent noise, and correlated with patient weight. We can also determine the singles rate and, thereby, activity necessary to achieve this maximum performance and, based on the known activity in the patient, predict optimal injected doses.