Feasibility of MRI attenuation correction in cardiac FDG-PET

Background Simultaneous acquisition PET-MRI is a new technology that has the potential to significantly impact diagnostic patient care. Cardiac imaging using PET-MRI offers high signal resolution MRI images superimposed on PET metabolic functional assessment. Specifically, 18Ffluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET-MR has the potential to provide both anatomic scar tissue evaluation and information regarding myocardial glucose metabolism. While early brain and soft tissue data have demonstrated that PET specific uptake values (SUVs) obtained using MRI for attenuation correction (AC) are comparable to SUVs obtained using CT AC, SUV measurements of myocardial tissue have not been compared. The objective of this pilot study is to determine the reproducibility of SUVs obtained by PET imaging using an AC µ-map comprised of a dual echo VIBE Dixon MRI sequence instead of CT. Methods