To improve quality of OSEM SPECT reconstruction in the mesh domain, we implemented an adaptive mesh generation
method that produces tomographic mesh consisting of triangular elements with size and density commensurate with
geometric detail of the objects. Node density and element size change smoothly as a function of distance from the edges
and edge curvature without creation of 'bad' elements. Tomographic performance of mesh-based OSEM reconstruction
is controlled by the tomographic mesh structure, i.e. node density distribution, which in turn is ruled by the number of
key points on the boundaries. A greedy algorithm is used to influence the distribution of nodes on the boundaries. The
relationship between tomographic mesh properties and OSEM reconstruction quality has been investigated. We conclude
that by selecting adequate number of key points, one can produce a tomographic mesh with lowest number of nodes that
is sufficient to provide desired quality of reconstructed images, appropriate for the imaging system properties.
KEYWORDS: Single photon emission computed tomography, Signal attenuation, Image quality, 3D image reconstruction, Quantitative analysis, Physics, Scanners, Image registration, Medical imaging, Data modeling
In order to improve reconstructed image quality, we investigated performance of OSEM mesh-domain SPECT reconstruction with explicit prior anatomical and physiological information that was used to perform accurate
attenuation compensation. It was accomplished in the following steps: (i) Obtain anatomical and physiological atlas of
desired region of interest; (ii) Generate mesh that encodes properties of the atlas; (iii) Perform initial pixel-based
reconstruction on projection dataset; (iv) Register the expected emission atlas to the initial pixel-based reconstruction
and apply resulting transformation to meshed atlas; (v) Perform reconstruction in mesh-domain using deformed mesh of
the atlas. This approach was tested on synthetic SPECT noise-free and noisy data. Comparative quantitative analysis
demonstrated that this method outperformed pixel-based OSEM with uniform AC and is a promising approach that
might lead to improved SPECT reconstruction quality.
A new method for attenuation compensation (AC) in mesh-domain SPECT OSEM reconstruction using strip-area
approximation (SAAC) is introduced and compared to single-ray AC (SRAC). SAAC uses the polygonal area of the
intersection of a mesh element (ME) and a tube-of-response (TOR) for defining an effective length of photon transit and
an effective attenuation coefficient. This approach to AC is compared to SRAC, which defines the effective length of
photon transit as the intersection of a single ray and a ME and the effective attenuation coefficient as the mean along the
ray path. Comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrated that SAAC outperformed SRAC in terms of
reconstruction image accuracy and quality.
KEYWORDS: Image quality, Single photon emission computed tomography, Expectation maximization algorithms, Reconstruction algorithms, 3D modeling, Signal attenuation, Systems modeling, Chest, 3D image reconstruction, Medical imaging
To improve the speed and quality of ordered-subsets
expectation-maximization (OSEM) SPECT reconstruction, we have
implemented a content-adaptive, singularity-based, mesh-domain, image model (CASMIM) with an accurate algorithm
for estimation of the mesh-domain system matrix. A preliminary image, used to initialize CASMIM reconstruction, was
obtained using pixel-domain OSEM. The mesh-domain representation of the image was produced by a 2D wavelet
transform followed by Delaunay triangulation to obtain joint estimation of nodal locations and their activity values. A
system matrix with attenuation compensation was investigated. Digital chest phantom SPECT was simulated and
reconstructed. The quality of images reconstructed with OSEM-CASMIM is comparable to that from pixel-domain
OSEM, but images are obtained five times faster by the CASMIM method.
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