Poisson-noise weighted filter for time-of-flight positron emission tomography

Gengsheng L Zeng; Li Lv; Qiu Huang

doi:10.1186/s42492-020-00048-8

Poisson-noise weighted filter for time-of-flight positron emission tomography

Vis Comput Ind Biomed Art. 2020 Apr 29;3(1):10. doi: 10.1186/s42492-020-00048-8.

Authors

Gengsheng L Zeng^{1

2}, Li Lv³, Qiu Huang³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Engineering, Utah Valley University, 800 West University Parkway, Orem, UT, 84058, USA. larry.zeng@uvu.edu.
² Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, University of Utah, 729 Arapeen Drive, Salt Lake City, UT, 84108, USA. larry.zeng@uvu.edu.
³ School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.

Abstract

Image reconstruction for list-mode time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) can be achieved by analytic algorithms. The backprojection filtering (BPF) algorithm is an efficient algorithm for this task. The conventional noise control method for analytic image reconstruction is the use of a stationary lowpass filter, which does not model the Poisson noise properly. This study proposes a nonstationary filter for Poisson noise control. The filter is implemented in the spatial domain in a form similar to convolution.

Keywords: Analytic reconstruction; Noise control; Nonstationary filter; Positron emission tomography; Time-of-flight.