Artifact-free quantitative cardiovascular PET/MR imaging: An impossible dream?

Excerpt

Building a winning team requires a bit of complementarity and convincing common goals to overcome the frustration of being tied together. In the journey of cardiac PET/MRI, this frustration has a name: less optimal attenuation correction (AC) as compared to its PET/CT counterpart where CT-based AC works reasonably well. AC has been a key component in the development of nuclear cardiology providing at the same time more reliable assessment of regions with relative tracer abnormalities and the ground for accurate quantification of tracer uptake.1 It is therefore no wonder that reproducing the same level of confidence in AC using MRI as achieved using CT has been a major drive in the research over PET/MRI in general and in cardiovascular imaging applications, in particular. …