The Effect of De-noising for Analytical SPECT Reconstruction with Non-uniform Attenuation

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a nuclear medicine imaging technique that is widely used in the clinical applications. For more accurate diagnosis, quantitative reconstruction of radiotracer concentration at any location inside the body is desired, which requires accurate compensation for the non-uniform attenuation and accurate treatment of the Poisson noise. However, we found that the treatment of Poisson noise in projection data (sinogram) would possibly affect the result of analytical SPECT reconstruction. In this paper, we used several de-noising methods to study the effect of de-noising for analytical SPECT reconstruction with non-uniform attenuation.