Physics in medicine and biology
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The susceptibility of MRI to metallic objects leads to void MR signal and missing information around metallic implants. In addition, body truncation occurs in MR imaging for large patients who exceed the transaxial field-of-view of the scanner. Body truncation and metal artefacts translate to incomplete MRI-derived attenuation correction (AC) maps, consequently resulting in large quantification errors in PET imaging. ⋯ The percentage of the torso volume affected by body truncation in the 3-class AC maps reduced from 9.8 ± 1.9% to 0.6 ± 0.3% after truncation compensation. PET quantification errors in the affected regions were also reduced from -45.5 ± 10% to -9.5 ± 3% after truncation compensation. The quantitative results demonstrated promising performance of the proposed approach towards the completion of MR images corrupted by metal artefacts and/or body truncation in the context of WB PET/MR imaging.