Impact of a new respiratory amplitude-based gating technique in evaluation of upper abdominal PET lesions

PET acquisition requires several minutes which can lead to respiratory motion blurring, to increase partial volume effect and SUV under-estimation. To avoid these artifacts, conventional 10-min phase-based respiratory gating (PBRG) can be performed but is time-consuming and difficult with a non-compliant patient. We evaluated an automatic amplitude-based gating method (AABG) which keeps 35% of the counts at the end of expiration to minimize respiratory motion. We estimated the impact of AABG on upper abdominal lesion detectability, quantification and patient management. Methods: We consecutively included 31 patients (82 hepatic and 25 perihepatic known lesions). Each patient underwent 3 acquisitions on a Siemens Biograph mCT (4 rings and time-of-flight): a standard free-breathing whole-body (SWB, 5–7 steps/2.5 min per step, 3.3 ± 0.4 MBq/kg of 18F-FDG), a 10-min PBRG with six bins and a 5-min AABG method. All gated acquisitions were performed with an ANZAI respiratory gating system. SUV_max and target to background ratio (TBR, defined as the maximum SUV of the lesion divided by the mean SUV of a region of interest drawn in healthy liver) were compared. Results: All 94 lesions in SWB images were detected in the gated images. 10-min PBRG and 5-min AABG acquisitions respectively revealed 9 and 13 new lesions and relocated 7 and 8 lesions. Four lesions revealed by 5-min AABG were missed by 10-min PBRG in 3 non-compliant patients. Both gated methods failed to relocate 2 lesions seen on SWB acquisition. Compared to SWB, TBR increased significantly with 10-min PBRG and with 5-min AABG (respectively 41 ± 59%, p = 4.10–3 and 66 ± 75%, p = 6.10–5) whereas SUV_max did not (respectively 14 ± 43%, p = 0.29 with 10-min PBRG, and 24 ± 46%, p = 0.11 with 5-min AABG). Conclusion: The AABG is a fast and a user-friendly respiratory gating method to increase detectability and quantification of upper abdominal lesions compared to the conventional PBRG procedure and the SWB acquisition