A survey of approaches for direct parametric image reconstruction in emission tomography

Charalampos Tsoumpas*, Federico E. Turkheimer, Kris Thielemans

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

78 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The quantitative data obtained by emission tomography are decoded using a number of techniques and methods in sequence to provide physiological information. Conventionally, the data are reconstructed to produce a series of static images. Then, pharmacokinetic modeling techniques are applied, and kinetic parameters that have physiological or functional significance are derived. Although it is possible to optimize each estimation step in this process, many simplifying assumptions have to be introduced to make the methods that are used practicable. Published research has shown that if the kinetic parameters are estimated directly from the measured data, the parametric images will have higher quality and lower mean-squared error than if this was done indirectly. This review highlights some aspects of the methods that have been proposed for such direct estimation of pharmacokinetic information from raw emission data. (C) 2008 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3963-3971
Number of pages9
JournalMedical Physics
Volume35
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept-2008
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • emission tomography
  • reconstruction
  • kinetic modeling
  • A-POSTERIORI RECONSTRUCTION
  • DYNAMIC PET IMAGES
  • MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD
  • SPECTRAL-ANALYSIS
  • SPATIOTEMPORAL DISTRIBUTIONS
  • STATISTICAL UNCERTAINTY
  • KINETIC-PARAMETERS
  • LINEAR-MODELS
  • ALGORITHM
  • BRAIN

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