On the implementation and analysis of Expectation Maximization algorithms with stopping criterion

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is an alternative reconstruction method to the Filtered Back Projection method, providing many advantages including decreased sensitivity to noise. However the algorithm requires a large number of iterations to reach adequate convergence. Due to this, research has been carried out into accelerating the convergence rate of the EM algorithm. In this paper we present an analysis of an EM implementation which uses both OSEM and MGEM, comparing results on a per time basis with both acceleration techniques alone as well as a combination of the two methods. We provide an alternative stopping criterion based on the RMS error of the projections of the current reconstruction and compare the result with an existing variance based approach.