Radioactive spheres without inactive wall for lesion simulation in PET.

With the growing importance of PET and PET/CT in diagnosis, staging, therapy monitoring and radiotherapy planning, appropriate tools to simulate lesions in phantoms are important. Normally hollow spheres, made of plastic or glass, which can be filled with radioactive solutions, are used. As these spheres have an inactive wall they do not reflect the real situation in the patient and lead to quantification errors in the presence of background activity. We propose spheres made of radioactive wax, which are easy to produce, give a high flexibility to the user and a more accurate quantification. These wax spheres were evaluated for their applicability in PET phantoms and it was found that the activity is not diffusing into the surrounding water in relevant quantities, that they show a sufficient homogeneity, and that their attenuation properties are equivalent to water for photons of PET energies. Recovery coefficients for the wax spheres were measured and compared with those obtained for fillable plastic spheres for diameters of 28, 16, 10, and 6 mm in the presence of background activity. Recovery coefficients of the wax spheres were found to be up to 21% higher than for the fillable spheres.