The USC Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering USC Signal and Image Processing Institute USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Southern California

Technical Report USC-SIPI-241

“OFast Gradient-Based Methods for Bayesian Reconstruction of Transmission and Emission”

by Erkan U. Mumcuoglu, Richard Leahy, Simon R. Cherry and Zhenyu Zhou

September 1993

We describe conjugate gradient algorithms for reconstruction of transmission and emission PET images. The reconstructions are based on a Bayesian formulation where the data are modeled as a collection of independent Poisson random variables and the image is modeled using a Markov random field. A conjugate gradient algorithm is used to compute a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the image by maximizing over the posterior density. To ensure non-negativity of the solution a penalty function is used to convert the problem to one of unconstrained optimization. Preconditioners are used to enhance convergence rates. These methods generally achieve effective convergence in 15-25 iterations. Reconstructions are presented of an 18FDG whole body scan from data collected using a Siemens/CTI ECAT931 whole body system. These results indicate significant improvements in emission image quality using the Bayesian approach, in comparison to filtered backprojection, particularly when reprojections of the MAP transmission image are used in place of the standard attenuation correction factors.

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