Siemens Medical Solutions Usa, Inc.

Cti Pet Systems, Inc.

David W Townsend

Ronald Nutt

William F Jones

Andrew Philip Moor

Johnny H Reed

John E Breeding

Wing K Luk

A patient bed drive mechanism, under control of a processor, is capable of continuously moving a patient bed through the a TOF-PET detector array having a stationary field of view (FOV) for a distance in excess of the physical extent of an axis of the array FOV. A direct memory access (DMA) rebinner card is coupled to the detector array to receive therefrom a stream of TOF-PET coincidence event data during the extent of movement of the bed. Image projection data are generated in real time from the acquired stream of TOF-PET coincidence event data via the DMA card.

On-line TOF-PET mashed rebinning for continuous bed motion acquisitions

A combined PET and X-Ray CT tomograph for acquiring CT and PET images sequentially in a single device, overcoming alignment problems due to internal organ movement, variations in scanner bed profile, and positioning of the patient for the scan. In order to achieve good signal-to-noise (SNR) for imaging any region of the body, an improvement to both the CT-based attenuation correction procedure and the uniformity of the noise structure in the PET emission scan is provided. The PET/CT scanner includes an X-ray CT and two arrays of PET detectors mounted on a single support within the same gantry, and rotate the support to acquire a full projection data set for both imaging modalities. The tomograph acquires functional and anatomical images which are accurately co-registered, without the use of external markers or internal landmarks.

Method for acquiring PET and CT images

Combined PET and X-ray CT tomograph

Combined PET and X-ray CT tomograph and method for using same

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Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America

David W Townsend