A novel partial volume effects correction technique integrating deconvolution associated with denoising within the PET image reconstruction process

In the present work, we propose the implementation of the noise controlled LR deconvolution algorithm directly inside the reconstruction process to further improve image resolution recovery and associated contrast to noise ratio. The incorporation of deconvolution within different EM reconstruction schemes has been assessed. In contrast to previous studies, this work aimed at modifying current reconstruction algorithms including system PSF modeling. The proposed approach was compared to standard PSF incorporated reconstruction and the application of the deconvolution and wavelet denoising directly on the reconstructed images. Finally different denoising schemes were also evaluated.