Image reconstruction methods for emission based tomography

Abstract

PET and SPECT scans are performed by in vitro injection of radioactive tracers to map the activity of specific cells. The MLEM and the OSEM algorithms are Expactation-Maximization methods which incorporate the Poisson nature of radiation and are the currently favoured methods for emission based tomography. A simple simulation based on the U-Spect configuration developed by MI-labs was used to see if other algorithms like CG-Least Squares or Newton-Raphson can outperform the MLEM algorithm under specific conditions.