Comments on the NEMA NU 4-2008 Standard on Performance Measurement of Small Animal Positron Emission Tomographs

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the NEMA NU 4-2008 standard for small animal PET scanner performance, highlighting flaws and proposing improvements to enhance its reliability and comparability.

Contribution

The authors identify specific issues in the NEMA standard related to spatial resolution, random rate estimation, sensitivity evaluation, and image quality metrics, and suggest potential improvements.

Findings

Filtered backprojection can cause artifacts affecting resolution measurements.

Standard's equations for random rate estimation are circular and unsolvable.

Ambiguities in sensitivity evaluation can lead to inconsistent results.

Abstract

The National Electrical Manufacturers Association's (NEMA) NU 4-2008 standard specifies methodology for evaluating the performance of small-animal PET scanners. The standard's goal is to enable comparison of different PET scanners over a wide range of technologies and geometries used. In this work, we discuss if the NEMA standard meets these goals and we point out potential flaws and improvements to the standard. For the evaluation of spatial resolution, the NEMA standard mandates the use of filtered backprojection reconstruction. This reconstruction method can introduce star-like artifacts for detectors with an anisotropic spatial resolution, usually caused by parallax error. These artifacts can then cause a strong dependence of the resulting spatial resolution on the size of the projection window in image space, whose size is not fully specified in the NEMA standard. We show that the standard's equations for the estimation of the random rate for PET systems with intrinsic radioactivity are circular and not satisfiable. We compare random rates determined by a method based on the standard to to random rates obtained using a delayed coincidence window and two methods based on the singles rates. We discuss to what extend the NEMA standard's protocol for the evaluation of the sensitivity is unclear and ambiguous, which can lead to unclear interpretations of publicizeded results. The standard's definition of the recovery coefficients in the image quality phantom includes the maximum activity in a region of interest, which causes a positive correlation of noise and recovery coefficients. This leads to an unintended trade-off between desired uniformity, which is negatively correlated with variance (i.e. noise), and recovery. With this work, we want to start a discussion on possible improvements in a next version of the NEMA NU-4 standard.