Evaluation of exercise tolerance of patients with heart failure and its clinical significance

A new method of PET attenuation using post-injection transmission scan is presented, which is especially useful in 18F-FDG static studies. The transmission scan is acquired right before the emission scan, which is used to subtract the emission component from the transmission data. When the effect of measurement condition upon the image noise was evaluated with a 20 cm diameter cylindrical phantom, an increase in the injection dose inflated the noise and caused artifacts. There was an optimum dose that minimized the image noise. As the external source activity increased, the image noise decreased, and the optimum dose increased linearly, which enabled estimation of the optimum injection dose under a given external source. When the total (emission plus transmission) scan time was fixed, longer emission scan resulted in better images than longer transmission scan.