Evaluation of Parallel Level Sets and Bowsher’s Method as Segmentation-Free Anatomical Priors for Time-of-Flight PET Reconstruction

摘要

In this article, we evaluate Parallel Level Sets (PLS) and Bowsher’s method as segmentation-free anatomical priors for regularized brain PET reconstruction. We derive the proximity operators for two PLS priors and use the EM-TV algorithm in combination with the first order primal-dual algorithm by Chambolle and Pock to solve the non-smooth optimization problem for PET reconstruction with PLS regularization. In addition, we compare the performance of two PLS versions against the symmetric and asymmetric Bowsher priors with quadratic and relative difference penalty function. For this aim, we first evaluate reconstructions of 30 noise realizations of simulated PET data derived from a real PET/MRI acquisition in terms of regional bias and noise. Second, we evaluate reconstructions of a real brain PET/MR data set acquired on a GE Signa TOF PET/MR in a similar way. The reconstructions of simulated and real 3D PET/MRI data show that all priors were superior to post-smoothed Maximum Likelihood Expectation Maximization with ordered subsets (OSEM) in terms of bias-noise characteristics in different regions of interest where the PET uptake follows anatomical boundaries. Our implementation of the asymmetric Bowsher prior showed slightly superior performance compared to the two versions of PLS and the symmetric Bowsher prior. At very high regularization weights, all investigated anatomical priors suffer from the transfer of non-shared gradients.