PET attenuation correction for rigid MR Tx/Rx coils from 176Lu background activity

One challenge for PET-MR hybrid imaging is the correction for attenuation of the 511 keV annihilation radiation by the required RF transmit and/or RF receive coils. Although there are strategies for building PET transparent Tx/Rx coils, such optimised coils still cause significant attenuation of the annihilation radiation leading to artefacts and biases in the reconstructed activity concentrations. We present a straightforward method to measure the attenuation of Tx/ Rx coils in simultaneous MR-PET imaging based on the natural Lu-176 background contained in the scintillator of the PET detector without the requirement of an external CT scanner or PET scanner with transmission source. The method was evaluated on a prototype 3T MR-BrainPET produced by Siemens Healthcare GmbH, both with phantom studies and with true emission images from patient/ volunteer examinations. Furthermore, the count rate stability of the PET scanner and the x-ray properties of the Tx/Rx head coil were investigated. Even without energy extrapolation from the two dominan gamma energies of Lu-176 to 511 keV, the presented method for attenuation correction, based on the measurement of Lu-176 background attenuation, shows slightly better performance than the coil attenuation correction currently used. The coil attenuation correction currently used is based on an external transmission scan with rotating Ge-68 sources acquired on a Siemens ECAT HR + PET scanner. However, the main advantage of the presented approach is its straightforwardness and ready availability without the need for additional accessories.