18F-Choline PET/CT Imaging Protocol

As previously described (3 (link)), ¹⁸FCH PET/CT images were acquired on a Biograph 6 TrueV PET/CT system (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany) with an extended field-of-view of 21.6 cm. A PET acquisition of 10 min (one-bed position) covering the neck and upper chest was performed in 3D list-mode 20 and 60 min after intravenous injection of 1.5 MBq/kg of ¹⁸FCH. For each acquisition, a low-dose CT (CAREdose ref. mAs 100, 130 kV, slice 3 mm, pitch 1.0) was performed. For clinical interpretation, PET raw data at 20 and 60 min were reconstructed with the point spread function (PSF) reconstruction algorithm (HD; TrueX, Siemens Medical Solutions; 3 iterations and 21 subsets) without filtering, with matrix size 256 × 256 and zoom 1.0. Scatter and attenuation corrections were applied. To fulfill EARL guideline requirements (9 (link)), an EARL1 reconstruction was generated with the same parameters and a postfiltering Gaussian filter of 6 mm was applied.