Abstract
Purpose
Reducing radiation dose or scanning time is important for patient safety when using nuclear medicine technique. The aim of this study is to develop a reconstruction method to suppress deterioration of image quality with only a small sampling number of projection data in single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).
Methods
We used total variation (TV) image reconstruction. However, the images reconstructed using expectation maximization (EM)-TV show systematic loss of contrast and blocky artifacts when the measurement data is noisy like SPECT data. Therefore, we first reduced projection data noise using a combination of diffusion filters and then reconstructed images from noise-reduced sinogram. Perona-Malik (PM) anisotropic diffusion filter and the nonlinear geometric diffusion filter were combined.
Results
For both the 3D Torso phantom and the NEMA IEC phantom, systematic contrast loss was seen when the images were reconstructed using EM-TV. In the Torso phantom, the combined filter showed similar normalized mean square error, streak indicator, and beta values to PM filter, but the signal-to-noise ratio gain of the image was the highest using the combined filter. In the NEMA phantom, background variability was considerably reduced when the combined filter was applied as pre-filters. Compared to geometric-EMTV, combined-EM-TV preserved edges well and produced a high-contrast image.
Conclusions
EM-TV with the combination of PM and geometric nonlinear diffusion filters was found to improve uniformity while maintaining contrast-to-noise ratio when angular sampling is low. The TV image reconstruction combined with the proposed diffusion filter can be beneficial for clinical SPECT imaging.
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Son, J., Kim, S.M. & Lee, J.S. A strategy to reduce blocky pattern and contrast loss in emission tomography reconstruction with reduced angular sampling and total variation minimization. Biomed. Eng. Lett. 4, 362–369 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13534-014-0165-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13534-014-0165-8