Reconstruction of 3D whole-body PET data using blurred anatomical labels

The diagnostic utility of whole-body PET is often limited by the high level of statistical noise in the images. An improvement in image quality can be obtained by incorporating correlated anatomical information during the reconstruction of the PET data. The combined PET/CT (SMART) scanner allows the acquisition of accurately aligned PET and CT whole-body data. The authors present results of incorporating aligned anatomical information from the CT during the reconstruction of 3D whole-body PET data. They use the FORE+PWLS method for the reconstruction and a label model to incorporate anatomical information via penalty weights. Since in practice mismatches between anatomical and functional data are unavoidable, the labels are “blurred” to reflect the uncertainty associated with the anatomical information. Results show the potential advantage of incorporating anatomical information by using a blurred labels with the penalty weights