Attenuation and activity distributions in flat-panel TOF-PET estimated by the alternating-direction method of multipliers
Journal
2015 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference
ISBN
9781467398626
Date Issued
2016
Author(s)
Abstract
Attenuation correction is an important step in the quantitative reconstruction of radiotracer activity distribution in positron emission tomography (PET), which was typically estimated through additional transmission measurements. With the hardware advancements, time-of-flight (TOF) equipped PET systems can mitigate noise and artifacts, thereby improving the image quality. Recently, the TOF-PET has been further extended to estimate not only activity distributions, but also attenuation maps simultaneously by use of iterative algorithms. In this work, we applied the alternating-direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to simultaneously reconstruct activity and attenuation estimates in our dual-head small-animal PET system. The results were compared with those obtained by use of the maximum-likelihood algorithm activity and attenuation estimation algorithm. The computer simulation results showed that the application of the ADMM algorithm could greatly improve the image quality and reduce noisy appearance.
Type
conference paper