Novel volume based approach to estimate contrast recovery for NEMA image quality phantom

In this paper a new recipe for precise measurement of contrast recovery in NEMA image quality phantom for PET scanners is proposed. To accomplish this, we developed flexible numerical tool in three dimensional Cartesian to compute contrast recovery inside volume of interest while accounting of partial volume effects at the boundary of sphere. Also a method has been developed to find a location of centroid for each hot sphere inside NEMA IQ phantom automatically. We compared our proposed method (3D) to current NEMA NU2 2018 standard (2D) used to estimate contrast recovery.