AI drops tracer dose required for PET/MRI by 50%, a potential ‘major’ boost for cancer care

Doctors can use a readily available deep learning tool to perform molecular imaging exams with 50% less radiotracer material, significantly reducing patients’ radiation exposure, experts reported Wednesday.

Clinicians are always looking for ways to decrease radiation dosage, and one technique for doing so involves reducing patients’ 18F-FDG requirements. But this can also degrade image quality and, in turn, affect follow-up management decisions.

Stanford University researchers sought to overcome this problem by using a convolutional neural network to reconstruct PET/MRI scans. The…