An Improved Weighting Kernel for Analytical Time-of-Flight PET Reconstruction

Author

Watson, Charles C.

Author_Institution

Siemens Med. Solutions Mol. Imaging, Knoxville, TN

Volume

55

Issue

5

fYear

2008

Firstpage

2551

Lastpage

2556

Abstract

We demonstrate a new weighting kernel for linear time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction that produces lower image noise variance in finite-sized objects than ldquoconfidence weightingrdquo (CW) or any other kernel previously reported in the literature. The proposed kernel is adaptive to object size, but is always broader than the CW kernel. For 1.25 nsec TOF resolution, the new kernel improves image noise variance in a 10 cm diameter cylinder by 8%. Small but significant gains in image noise variance are also seen in clinical reconstructions.

Keywords

medical image processing; positron emission tomography; image noise variance; linear time-of-flight PET reconstruction; positron emission tomography; time-of-flight PET reconstruction; weighting kernel; Biomedical imaging; Distributed computing; Filters; Humans; Image reconstruction; Image resolution; Kernel; Molecular imaging; Positron emission tomography; Reconstruction algorithms; Confidence weighting; positron emission tomography (PET); reconstruction; time-of-flight (TOF); weighting kernel;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TNS.2008.2001411

Filename

4696590