PET reconstruction via nonlocal means induced prior

Application of a Flexible PET Scanner Combined with 3 T MRI Using Non-local Means Reconstruction: Qualitative and Quantitative Comparison with Whole-Body PET/CT

PURPOSE

Flexible positron emission tomography (fxPET) employing a non-local means reconstruction algorithm was designed to fit existing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. We aimed to compare the qualitative and quantitative performance of fxPET among fxPET with MR-based attenuation correction (MRAC), fxPET with CT-based attenuation correction (CTAC) using CT as a part of WB PET/CT, and whole-body (WB) PET/CT.

PROCEDURES

Sixteen patients with suspected head and neck cancer underwent 2-deoxy-2-[¹⁸F]fluoro-D-glucose WB PET/CT scans, followed by fxPET and 3 T MRI scans. Phantom data were compared among the three datasets. For registration accuracy, we measured the distance between the center of the tumor determined by fxPET and that in MRI. We compared image quality, detection rates, and quantitative values including maximal standardized uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), total lesion glycolysis (TLG), and tumor-to-muscle ratio (TMR) among the three datasets.

RESULTS

The phantom data in fxPET, except the percent contrast recoveries of 17-mm and 22-mm hot spheres, were inferior to those in WB PET/CT. The mean registration accuracy was 4.4 mm between fxPET using MRAC and MRI. The image quality was comparable between two fxPET datasets, but significantly inferior to WB PET/CT (p < 0.0001). In contrast, detection rates were comparable among the three datasets. SUVmax was significantly higher, and MTV and TLG were significantly lower in the two fxPET datasets compared with the WB PET/CT dataset (p < 0.005). There were no significant differences in SUVmax, MTV, and TLG between the two fxPET datasets or in TMR among the three datasets. All quantitative values had significantly positive correlations.

CONCLUSIONS

Compared with WB PET/CT, the phantom data and image quality were inferior in fxPET. However, the results of the detection rates and quantitative values suggested the clinical feasibility of fxPET.

OMEGA-open-source emission tomography software

In this paper we present OMEGA, an open-source software, for efficient and fast image reconstruction in positron emission tomography (PET). OMEGA uses the scripting language of MATLAB and GNU Octave allowing reconstruction of PET data with a MATLAB or GNU Octave interface. The goal of OMEGA is to allow easy and fast reconstruction of any PET data, and to provide a computationally efficient, easy-access platform for development of new PET algorithms with built-in forward and backward projection operations available to the user as a MATLAB/Octave class. OMEGA also includes direct support for GATE simulated data, facilitating easy evaluation of the new algorithms using Monte Carlo simulated PET data. OMEGA supports parallel computing by utilizing OpenMP for CPU implementations and OpenCL for GPU allowing any hardware to be used. OMEGA includes built-in function for the computation of normalization correction and allows several other corrections to be applied such as attenuation, randoms or scatter. OMEGA includes several different maximum-likelihood and maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithms with several different priors. The user can also input their own priors to the built-in MAP functions. The image reconstruction in OMEGA can be computed either by using an explicitly computed system matrix or with a matrix-free formalism, where the latter can be accelerated with OpenCL. We provide an overview on the software and present some examples utilizing the different features of the software.