Automated material map generation from MRI scout pairs for preclinical PET attenuation correction

A novel method is presented to perform material map segmentation from preclinical MRI for corresponding PET attenuation correction. MRI does not provide attenuation ratio, hence segmenting a material map from it is challenging. Furthermore the MRI images often suffer from ghost artifacts. On the contrary MRI has no radiation dose. Our method operated with fast spin echo scout pairs that had perpendicular frequency directions. This way the direction of the ghost artifacts were perpendicular as well. Our body-air segmentation method built on this a priori information and successfully erased the ghost artifacts from the final binary mask. Visual and quantitative validation was performed by two preclinical specialists. Results indicate that our method is effective against MRI scout ghost artifacts and that PET attenuation correction based on MRI makes sense even on preclinical images.