A method for small-animal PET/CT alignment calibration

Small-animal positron-emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scanners provide anatomical and molecular imaging, which enables the joint visualization and analysis of both types of data. A proper alignment calibration procedure is essential for small-animal imaging since resolution is much higher than that in human devices. This work presents an alignment phantom and two different calibration methods that provide a reliable and repeatable measurement of the spatial geometrical alignment between the PET and the CT subsystems of a hybrid scanner. The phantom can be built using laboratory materials, and it is meant to estimate the rigid spatial transformation that aligns both modalities. It consists of three glass capillaries filled with a positron-emitter solution and positioned in a non-coplanar triangular geometry inside the system field of view. The calibration methods proposed are both based on automatic line detection, but with different approaches to calculate the transformation of the lines between both modalities. Our results show an average accuracy of the alignment estimation of 0.39 mm over the whole field of view. (note)