Exercises in PET Image Reconstruction

These exercises are complementary to the theoretical lectures about positron emission tomography (PET) image reconstruction. They aim at providing some hands on experience in PET image reconstruction and focus on demonstrating the different data preprocessing steps and reconstruction algorithms needed to obtain high quality PET images. Normalisation, geometric-, attenuation- and scatter correction are introduced. To explain the necessity of those some basics about PET scanner hardware, data acquisition and organisation are reviewed. During the course the students use a software application based on the STIR (software for tomographic image reconstruction) library (1,2) which allows them to dynamically select or deselect corrections and reconstruction methods as well as to modify their most important parameters. Following the guided tutorial, the students get an impression on the effect the individual data precorrections have on image quality and what happens if they are forgotten. Several data sets in sinogram format are provided, such as line source data, Jaszczak phantom data sets with high and low statistics and NEMA whole body phantom data. The two most frequently used reconstruction algorithms in PET image reconstruction, filtered back projection (FBP) and the iterative OSEM (ordered subset expectation maximation) approach are used to reconstruct images. The exercise should help the students gaining an understanding what the reasons for inferior image quality and artefacts are and how to improve quality by a clever choice of reconstruction parameters.