Dedicated breast positron emission tomography (db-PET) is more sensitive than whole-body positron emission tomography and is thus expected to detect early stage breast cancer and determine treatment efficacy. However, it is challenging to decrease the sensitivity of the chest wall side at the edge of the detector, resulting in a relative increase in noise and a decrease in detectability. Longer acquisition times and injection of larger amounts of tracer improve image quality but increase the burden on the patient. Therefore, this study aimed to improve image quality via reconstruction with shorter acquisition time data using deep learning, which has recently been widely used as a noise reduction technique. In our proposed method, a multi-adaptive denoising filter bank structure was introduced by training the training data separately for each detector area because the noise characteristics of db-PET images vary at different locations. Input and ideal images were reconstructed based on 1- and 7-min collection data, respectively, using list mode data. The deep learning model used residual learning with an encoder-decoder structure. The image quality of the proposed method was superior to that of existing noise reduction filters such as Gaussian filters and nonlocal mean filters. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the maximum standardized uptake values before and after filtering using the proposed method. Taken together, the proposed method is useful as a noise reduction filter for db-PET images, as it can reduce the patient burden, scan time, and radiotracer amount in db-PET examinations.
Keywords: Dedicated breast PET; Deep learning; Image processing; Noise reduction.
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