2008 · 105 citations · 17 references
MedicineNuclear MedicineRadiologyBiomedical ImagingDiagnostic ImagingDiagnostic RadiologyImage ReconstructionMedical Image FormationMedical ImagingNeuroimaging PhysicsPositron Emission TomographyVariational FormulationCardiac Pet ImagingEm AlgorithmNonlinear Variational FormulationNonlinear Variational ProblemsNuclear Half-lifePet Image ReconstructionRadioactive Half-lifeReconstruction Algorithms
PET measurements of tracers with a lower dose rate or short radioactive half life suffer from extremely low SNRs. In these cases standard reconstruction methods (OSEM, EM, filtered backprojection) deliver unsatisfactory and noisy results. Here, we propose to introduce nonlinear variational methods into the reconstruction process to make an efficient use of a-priori information and to attain improved imaging results. We illustrate our technique by evaluating cardiac H <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">15</sup> O measurements. The general approach can also be used for other specific goals allowing to incorporate a-priori information about the solution with Poisson distributed data.
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