Multi-bed tracer kinetic imaging of micro-parameters from dynamic time-of-flight PET data

Compartmental modelling in dynamic imaging requires the full time course of the activity distribution to be sampled. Due to the need for increased early temporal sampling, leading to severely low signal to noise ratio (SNR) in those early frames, such protocols are restricted to a single bed. Time-of-flight (TOF) imaging has been shown to improve the SNR in static imaging applications. When used in dynamic imaging, the effective NEC gain could be used to generate TOF equivalent dynamic data with reduced frame duration and allow interleaving between adjacent bed positions to increase the axial extent from single bed to multi-bed acquisitions. Coupling this with the recent introduction of continuous bed motion acquisition modes, could make such a dynamic protocol feasible. Using simulated data based on the Siemens mCT, we propose an axially extended dynamic imaging protocol and demonstrate the feasibility of generating TOF equivalent dynamic data as well as extending kinetic parameter estimation using compartmental modelling from single-to multi-bed dynamic imaging.